VA industry group ready to give advice on VistA
Ed Meagher, who chairs an industry group that advises the Veterans Affairs Department, is preparing recommendations for modernizing VistA.
Get ready for some long-awaited news on the modernization of the Veterans Affairs Department’s VistA electronic health records system.
Since October, Ed Meagher has been chairing the VistA Policy Industry Group that's preparing recommendations on the next phase of VistA at the request of VA Chief Information Office Roger Baker. Meagher told me the report will be delivered to Baker on May 3 and there will be press events near that time.
Meagher has formerly served as VA's deputy assistant secretary for information and technology, and currently is senior principal for health programs at SRA International Corp.
“VistA is the best health information system in the world, bar none,” Meagher told me earlier. “At the same time, VistA is very old, very hard to maintain, hard to manage and manipulate, and incredibly expensive to maintain. [All] of those statements are true, so what do you do to modernize it and make it easy to maintain?”
Stay tuned. We’ll be getting those recommendations soon.