Over 10 Years of Experience Implementing VistA in Commercial Healthcare Environments

This is third in a series of blog posts highlighting DSS’s experience and success stories supporting the VA and improving Veteran care and outcomes.

For more than 10 years, DSS has invested in enhancing VistA for all hospitals and health systems. This effort has involved the extensive fine-tuning of a proven and flexible health information system, which enables interoperability and ARRA Meaningful Use certification, as well as reduces cost.

By developing a scalable, customizable EHR called vxVistA that integrates with additional Open Source and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) extensions, DSS has been able to expand the breadth of capabilities of VistA to healthcare specialties like behavioral health, dental, ophthalmology and oncology.

Over the years, this effort has certainly caught on in the commercial healthcare arena.

For example, the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) uses vxVistA as part of the state’s Electronic Public Health Information (EPI) initiative to adopt a statewide EHR, replace selected functionality of the current Patient Tracking Billing Management Information System (PTBMIS) and facilitate interoperability with TDH public health delivery systems.

In addition, the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) is using vxVistA at its current hospital locations. The DSS solution replaced the state agency's existing EHR system, which was comprised of component parts, to improve patient record tracking, interoperability between state-run inpatient and outpatient sites, and to improve overall efficiency and effectiveness of mental health services through the DSS Mental Health Suite.

The commercial implementations of VistA reinforce how DSS has extensive knowledge of taking a legacy system and modernizing it for today’s healthcare needs.

Stay tuned for more insights in this blog post series where will cover a wide-range of topics about DSS’ 25-plus-year legacy of VistA support. For our next blog post, we will discuss how our average development staff member possesses over 12 years of VA workflow and technology experience; cumulatively this exceeds 1400 man-years of VA technology experience.