...So why would the DoD contract out the development of a health records system instead of co-opting VistA, which can be reworked for different contexts? It’s not because of it’s too difficult, that’s for sure. Blankenhorn quotes Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and an outspoken champion of the VA noting that the government “could wire Walter Reed or Bethesda (the two biggest military hospitals) for VistA in an afternoon. Technically there’s no big problem....”

...Yet still, the DoD created an entirely new system—one which has only limited interoperability with VistA. Longman, the author of The Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours, explains just how bad things are: “I just gave 11 [speeches] to front line VA employees in the last few weeks, and I heard over and over again their frustration over not being able to get to the people at the [DoD] making the hand-offs [of patients between departments]. Not only can’t the computers talk to each other, they can’t get the Army doctor in Germany on the phone to answer a simple question...

...What’s going on here? Why is the DoD strangling VistA? Why is the government wasting time and taxpayer dollars on contracts while ignoring the potential of a proven, high-quality IT system like VistA? Longman has some ideas. For one, he says, “there are DoD people who have built their careers on AHLTA and want people to switch to their system.” Further, he notes, “the recent political appointees to the VA…are people with DoD backgrounds. And the DoD culture is ‘procure everything’ – they don’t make anything themselves, they procure it. When they get to the VA they don’t appreciate the open source culture...” LINK