User:Hydenseek/Here

As a new user and proponent of the WorldVistA Electronic Health Record, I will document on this page my personal experience using the software on a test system in my home.

How I became interested:

I suppose I am like the majority of people, I have always been in good health, had medical insurance and had very limited contact with the Health Care System, yet assumed I knew "how it all worked" if I did need to use it.

A recent health issue left me reeling with disbelief with regard to the lack of patient health information being readily available to the very health care providers who needed it. Every visit to a hospital, doctor, or clinic seemed as though I were visiting an island known only to itself. I would fill out the same paperwork over and over: Name, address, wife's name, allergies, past surgeries, and on and on. Most places did not use a computer but relied on a paper record system to keep track of my information. I thought to myself this is the most inefficient system I have ever seen. I mean we live in an age where I can buy a widget at WalMart in Syracuse, fly to Chicago and the WalMart clerk there can tell me what I bought, where I bought it and how much I paid for it in seconds.

This prompted me to begin searching for the reason things were the way they were. I came across Google Health and immediately began a health record for myself. If I went to a new doctor I printed out my Google Health record and they were amazed at what I had done in so short a time. But the health record information is for them to gather not me,(fortunately I was still healthy enough to be able to build the record) so I looked further and soon found WorldVistaEHR.

Now here was a free piece of software that ran the VA, one of the largest health care systems in the world and I became an immediate fan. But why wasn't everyone using it? It turns out that WorldvistA is too good, too complete, and too not Windows. Everyone wants a point and click interface and WV is far from that, except for CPRS of course.

I have known for a long time that a piece of software will never learn how you want it to behave, you MUST learn how it behaves so I set about learning how it functions. Enter HardHats, a dedicated group of individuals whose goal is to further the acceptance of VistA and its derivatives in applications outside the VA. If not for these HardHats, VistA would be dead and buried never to see life outside the VA. What they are trying to accomplish is akin to moving a mountain, they number perhaps a few hundered strong yet have turned the heads of many people.