WorldVistA Testimonials

WorldVistA, thanks to its public-domain origins, costs about one-tenth of what a proprietary system does for a license fee and a support contract. And like any good open-source project, it’s constantly improving. A community of programmers fixes glitches and adds features, just as is done for the open-source Firefox browser and the Linux operating system.
And WorldVistA can be scaled up or down. It can work for neighborhood clinics, small-town hospitals, hospital systems, or, well, the Department of Veterans Affairs. WorldVistA’s big promise is that it can become the nationwide standard for electronic medical records, the backbone of a national network of health care. Your medical records could be read instantly and understood (perhaps less instantly) by any provider, anywhere.
But for the vast majority of health care providers, WorldVistA is what they’ve been waiting for: a low-cost, simple-to-use system that makes it easier to provide quality health care. If only it could upgrade the waiting-room magazines, too.
By THOMAS GOETZ
Published: May 30, 2007
New York Times

"Since the early 1990s, the VA has been a pioneer in adopting information technology, using an integrated electronic health record system to promote high quality care. The VA now outperforms Medicare and most private health plans on many quality measures. Prescriptions, lab tests, studies, consults, reports, and progress notes from all visits by patients to any VA hospital are stored in EHRs."
Dr. Cara B. Litvin
New England Journal of Medicine

"Open-source software is ideal for healthcare IT. "VistA is "the most widely deployed advanced EHR system in the United States [because] VistA, unlike proprietary EHR systems, evolves."
Fred Trotter

The project began with a medical-records program called VistA at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA had the name long before Microsoft). That system helped transform the VA from a medical backwater into the country's best-run, most cost-effective health care organization. The WorldVistA founders took the VA's public-domain software and turned it into a collaborative project, with all the hallmarks of open source: The software doesn't cost much to implement, and a large community stands ready to offer support. It's also surprisingly easy for hospitals and clinics large and small to use, which means it could become the de facto standard in the US, and perhaps beyond.
Wired Magazine

VistA is the aspirin of EHRs and if it was a drug, every provider would prescribe it. But just like generic aspirin, there are no “drug representatives” or lobbyists to sell it. Its effectiveness is clearly supported in the literature, but administrators don't have time to read the literature. So they listen to the sales pitch and the lobbyists. In the healthcare industry, that could cost lives. In healthcare, when lives are at stake, I believe we should hold ourselves to the same standard we hold our physicians and use the evidence whenever possible to evaluate and select technology solutions...not advertising or marketing hype. And that is why Clinica Adelante chose VistA EHR.
Dr. Matthew King
Testimony before Congress regarding the Clinica Adelante deployment of WorldVistA EHR

Back to Top