8th VistA Community Meeting

Eighth VistA Community Meeting: Norcross, Georgia 16-19 October 2003

The VistA Community met in Norcross, Georgia from Thursday, October 16 through Sunday October 19, 2003. The meeting was at The Royal (http://www.royalnorcross.com), with a presentation given at the adjacent New City Hall.

The meeting was attended by 36 people.

Meeting Agenda

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.

From 4pm to 6pm on Friday, October 17, there was a presentation and demonstration of VistA to the public and the press by members of the VistA community.

Agenda