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10th VistA Community Meeting

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What
  • VistA Community Meeting
When Jun 17, 2004 09:00 AM to
Jun 20, 2004 06:35 PM
Where tenth-vista-community-meeting
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Tenth VistA Community Meeting

Space Needle

17 - 20 June 2004
School of Dentistry (www.dental.washington.edu)
University of Washington (UW)
Seattle, Washington USA

Presentations

1. Oklahoma Project Presentation by Claudine Beron

Here is a copy of Ms. Beron's presentation in pdf format.

2. Draft Community Plan by Joel West and Siobhan O'Mahony

Here is a copy of his presentation in pdf format.

Meeting Overview

VistA Community Meetings are working meetings.

Ultimately, the agenda of a VistA Community Meeting is driven by the interests of the participants. The first session is a round table where the participants introduce themselves and state their objectives for the meeting. The meeting's tracks are then finalized and working groups are formed. The groups work independently (often in the same room), with regular plenary sessions to review progress. The following are the common activities of VistA Community Meetings.

  • Software installation -- anyone who attends the meeting with a laptop or personal computer will have an opportunity to leave with the VistA open source free software (OSFS) stack installed on it. Attendees are invited to bring their personal computers with network cards and cables or WiFi cards.

  • Development coordination -- there is ongoing VistA development in the VistA community outside the VA, and the VA provides regular updates of VistA. These parallel developments must be merged in order to keep VistA coherent.

  • Education and information sharing -- although VistA is easy to use in a clinical setting, it is a tremendously capable system that takes expertise to configure and maintain. There is literally no one person who is expert in all aspects of VistA.

  • Advocacy -- since VistA is in the public domain, there is no vendor with a large marketing budget to publicize and promote it. The economy around VistA is based on providing services. Thus, public advocacy of VistA plays a significant role in the effort to bring to society the benefits of VistA--a monumental and valuable project for which we have paid (and continue to pay) with our tax dollars.

The meetings are opportunities to work hard--individuals are often there late into the evening--and also to interact with others from around the country, and sometimes around the world, who share an interest in improving the quality and affordability of healthcare through the use of the VistA OSFS stack.

Agenda

The Seattle meeting is organized around four tracks:

  • VistA as a Teaching Tool -- How can VistA be used to aid in teaching medicine? How can it be used to help teach medical informatics? If there are medical standards that govern the practice of medicine, what about the practice of medical informatics? What features should a pharmacy or laboratory software package provide before it can be called a pharmacy of lab package? What are VistA's strengths and weaknesses regarding these questions? During this track, medical professionals and VistA experts will collaborate to produce some initial diagnoses, prognoses, and guidelines for future exploration.

  • Building the VistA Community -- WorldVistA grew out of the Hardhats to extend its reach with a formal organization. Now that its first phase of development--its birth--is complete, WorldVistA needs to be molded into a collaborative membership organization that acts as a community center, like a New England village commons. At the ninth meeting in Houston, VistA community members met to discuss the essential features of an organizational model and operating plan for WorldVistA. At this meeting we need to finish the design, begin accepting membership, and formally launch several collaborative projects.

  • OpenVistA Goes Live -- With several hospitals and clinics seriously pursuing installation of OpenVistA in production, we need to refine, verify, and document the version of OpenVistA that they will install. By the end of this meeting, we want to distribute CDs with OpenVistA version 3.0 as a first production version.

  • Installing OpenVistA -- Attendees interested in installing Linux, GT.M, and VistA on their laptops will have the chance to work together with volunteers to learn how to do this and to help document the process of installing and configuring OpenVistA.

Meeting Venue

The University of Washington School of Dentistry is hosting this meeting, which is being held at the Warren G. Magnuson Health Sciences Center.

Hotels

Here are some nearby hotels:


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