The Holy Grail

VistA is a robust and complete EHR system, but it relies on MUMPS. This makes VistA extremely expensive to configure and maintain.

The open source web-based EHR systems are easy to deploy but have underwhelming feature sets.

The holy grail of open source Health Informatics is a web-based CPRS (CPRS is the frontend for VistA).

It would be simple to install and configure like a web app, but it would have the sheer power elegance of VistA.

Apparently, ClearHealth has pulled this off. David Uhlman has just written to tell me that he has released screen shots for WebVistA. Granting that a screenshot is different from a working system, even seeing this much progress changes everything.  Frankly, this is almost too good to be true.

If you had asked me yesterday I would have said that it might be a good idea for Medsphere to buy ClearHealth. If you ask me today, I would say that it might be a good idea for ClearHealth to buy Medsphere.

-FT