14th VistA Community Meeting

Preamble

The goal of VistA Community Meetings is to allow
those involved in the VistA Community to network & collaborate,
i.e., to share ideas and work, with the objective of moving VistA &
the VistA community forward. VistA Community Meetings are highly
interactive, hands-on, working meetings. Please come prepared to contribute as well as to learn.

Compared
to most meetings, VistA Community Meetings are relatively
unstructured. The agenda is always a draft agenda, because the
attendees are free to change it even during the meeting in order to
better meet their objectives.

VistA Community Meetings were
originally almost exclusively technical meetings. Over time, the
balance has shifted, so that although there is still a strong technical
focus, there are increasingly discussions on other aspects, including
implementation, support, demonstration, education, training, and
WorldVistA organizational issues (e.g., membership).

Please
come prepared to discuss your interest in and work with VistA. If you
wish to present material, please come prepared with your presentation,
either electronic or a poster. There will be ample opportunities to
present your work to others who are interested.

If you come
with a laptop or PC, you will be able to leave with a free / open
source VistA software stack running on it. This stack is based on
Linux; in the event you want Linux installed on your hard drive, you
will be able to do this at the meeting. If you do not have or wish
Linux installed, please bring your laptop and a 1GB USB flash drive –
you will be able to run a free / open source VistA stack without
touching your machine’s hard drive.

To send suggested changes
to this agenda, please e-mail K.S. Bhaskar (bhaskar at bhaskars dot
com). Also, if you have actually implemented VistA in your
organization, please contact K.S. Bhaskar as soon as possible.

Location, Facilities

The 14th VistA Community Meeting will take place at the conference facilities in Building 101 at:

National Institute of Standards & Technology
100 Bureau Drive
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-1071

See http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/maps/nistmaps.html for directions.

For those planning to take the shuttle service from the Summerfield Suites, the van will leave the lobby at 8am.

Meeting Rooms

Plenary sessions will take place in the Green auditorium.

Tuesday, January 9

  • Green auditorium seats 300; fixed seating

  • Employee lounge 20-30 people, tables

  • Lecture room A 88 people, fixed

  • Lecture room B 88 people, fixed

  • Lecture room C 50 people, classroom style

Wednesday, January 10

  • Green auditorium

  • Lecture room E – 40-50 people, classroom style

  • Lecture room F – 40-50 people, classroom style

Thursday, January 11

  • Green auditorium

  • Employee lounge

Food

  • Breakfast is not provided.

  • Morning and afternoon beverages will be provided outside the Green auditorium.

  • Lunch
    will be provided coupons will be issued and we will eat in the NIST
    cafeteria. We are requested to eat at 12:45 or later on Tuesday, and
    12:30pm or later on other days.

We are requested to abide by NIST rules and not bring food into the meeting rooms except the employee lounge.

Internet access

Wifi
access to the Internet will be available in meeting rooms other than
Green auditorium. You will be required to sign a form to use the
wireless Internet. Non-standard protocols (e.g., Skype) will not work.

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

At
a plenary session on the first morning of VistA Community Meetings,
attendees introduce themselves and their interests & objectives for
the meeting. Based on the interests and objectives, tracks are
formed. The structure of the meeting is plenary sessions of general
interest interspersed with tracks working in parallel and periodically
reporting back to the complete group.

Likely tracks for this meeting include, but are not limited to:

  • Technology
    (there is always a hands-on developer / technology track) sharing
    development and ideas, version control, code management, web access,
    etc.

  • Demonstration including technologies (e.g.,
    live CDs, virtual machine based appliances); managing data (populating,
    refreshing and aging data to keep it meaningful)

  • Education including programs, curricula, certification

  • VistA Office EHR availability, technology, licensing

  • Standards compliance CCHIT, CEN 13606, Open EHR, HL7, etc.

  • Promotion & public awareness national, international
  • Internationalization
0830 Registration
0900 Call to order, announcements, meeting objectives, overview
0915

Bettijoyce Lide
will welcome us to NIST and review of NIST activities in the area of
electronic health records and the Office of the National Coordinator
for Health Information Technology.
0945

 WorldVistA Summary news; review of 2006; look ahead to 2007. Presentation by Joseph Dal Molin.
1030 Refreshment / networking break
1100

 Introductions; Plan tracks
Attendees introduce themselves and their interests & objectives for
the meeting. Based on the interests and objectives, tracks are formed.
1245 Lunch
1330

 Fileman the relational database management system underlying VistA. Greg Woodhouse
will present an overview and tutorial on Fileman, the foundation of
VistA. Although the topic is technical, his focus will be general.
Understanding Fileman conceptually is important to understanding how
VistA works.
1500 Refreshment / networking break
1530

 First
parallel tracks in the different meeting rooms. Rooms will be assigned
based on the actual tracks and numbers of people interested. Among the
tracks:

  • Depending on interest, K.S. Bhaskar will lead a session on booting and running VistA with a live CD and a USB flash drive. Please bring a laptop and a USB flash drive of at least 512MB.
1700

 Report
from leaders of parallel tracks at a plenary session. Since attendees
to VistA Community Meetings often have multiple interests, each
parallel track reports on its work to the entire meeting.
1730 Break for the day

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

0900

 VistA Office EHR Overview. Joseph Dal Molin
will present the VistA Office EHR project, which is currently in Beta
test and scheduled to wind down in January, 2007. He will discuss the
project goals, summarize its history, present plans to release the
software. There will be a Q&A session and a discussion of the
future of this important project.
1030 Refreshment / networking break
1045

 WorldVistA Membership Peter Bodtke & Colin Smith
will lead a session WorldVistA membership. What do members of the
VistA community want as part of their WorldVistA membership? How can
WorldVistA leadership better respond to and communicate with the
membership? How can the members help the leaders help the members
(e.g., maintain sections of the website)? This is your chance to speak
up for what you want.
1100

 Parallel tracks in different rooms. Among the tracks:

  • Kevin Toppenberg will talk about VistA programming (Part 1)
1245 Lunch
1330

 Mike Grambo will present his observations / findings from a visit to an Oklahoma State Veterans Home.
1430

 VistA Office EHR Technical. Cameron Schlehuber will lead a session on the technology of VistA Office EHR, covering topics such as:

  1. What were / are the design goals / functional requirements of VOE?
  2. How
    is VOE different from FOIA VistA (i.e., what’s new, what’s missing,
    what standards does it meet)? Which release of FOIA VistA does VOE
    most closely resemble?
  3. What is the VOE life cycle model and how does it differ from that of VistA?
  4. How will we keep VOE and FOIA VistA from diverging?
  5. What will an implementer of VOE need to do to be able to continue to accept patches?

The session will include time for Q&A and discussion.
1545 Refreshment / networking break
1600

Parallel tracks in different meeting rooms. Among the tracks:

  • (Suggested
    topic) Outreach & collaboration What can the VistA community do
    to improve the awareness of VistA? Given that the expertise in VistA
    is limited, and that realistically networks of experts will be needed
    to support VistA implementation activities, how can we organize
    ourselves better to make the VistA community both more effective and
    more efficient in what we do?
  • Continue Q&A on VistA Office EHR if there is a need for further discussion.
  • Kevin Toppenberg will talk about VistA programming (Part 2).
1700 Report from the leaders of parallel tracks at a plenary session
1730 Break for the day

Thursday, January 11, 2007

0900

 Plenary
session panel discussion Is VistA a Product or a Process? It has
often been said that VistA is a process, not a product. A
panel of VistA experts Greg Woodhouse, Dave Whitten, & Norman Dodd moderated by Cameron Schlehuber will discuss the subject and respond to questions and comments from the audience.
1030 Refreshment / networking break
1100

 Parallel tracks in different meeting rooms. In the technical track:

  • Greg Woodhouse will lead a discussion on selected topics from the theory of algorithms.
1230 Lunch
1300

Parallel tracks in different meeting rooms:

  • Doug Goldstein and Marc Wine will present some of the findings from their recent book Medical Informatics 20/20.
  • Alex Hill and Uri Schor (the latter remotely via the web) will present JUMPS, a MUMPS to Java converter.
1400 Refreshment / networking break
1430

Plenary session:

  • Report from leaders of parallel tracks.
  • Review and summary, including feedback to the conference organizers and follow up.
1600 Break till the next VistA Community Meeting