The Department of Veterans Affairs Technology Acquisition Center issued a Request for Information (RFI) on replacing the VistA “Medical Scheduling Package” (MSP). The VA’s existing MSP is more than a quarter century old, is highly inefficient, no longer can effectively support the multiple linkages needed to engage patients, clinicians and ancillary services, and no longer can support new models of clinical care delivery.
The VA envisions:
• A scheduling system which is standards-based, modular, extensible, and scalable
• A new veteran-centered medical scheduling system that relies on web and mobile devices
• A new system that will build a foundation to build scheduling functions to support new models of care and new ways of engaging veterans and clinicians
• A phased approach to mitigate some of the risk of developing a complex and expensive process
• A procurement that is based on specific, tested, and mutually agreed upon outcomes not just best efforts.
In 2011, the VA created an open source custodial agent to enable a structured and predictable migration path from custom and proprietary VistA software to an openly designed, standards-based, modular, scalable, and extensible platform. The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) is the custodial agent for the VistA open source codebase.
For more information on the RFI, go to www.fbo.gov (posted December 21, 2011) with the response to the RFI due on January 31, 2012.
