Defending VA-VistA

I was heavily quoted in a recent article in Government Health IT entitled VA’s health IT gamble. In it, I present the case that the current IT centralization efforts within the VA are damaging to VistA and therefore the VA’s ability to deliver quality care. From the article:

“Historically, each hospital hired programmers to solve that hospital’s needs,” Trotter said. “Other hospitals then adapted those solutions to their own needs. With the centralization process, all VistA programmers will be working for a central bureau. This could stop 30 years of innovation in which the best local innovations were taken national.”

Ironically the article cited a VA official as saying that they were taking a “Evolutionary approach”, despite the fact that they just bought a Cerner lab system rather than building the functionality into VistA. Strange.

-FT