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VistA History
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The VistA History Project
VistA's history has been a political hot potato for too long, alternately suppressed or distorted. WorldVistA
is launching the VistA History Project to shine a spotlight on this vital effort, to examine its origins,
capture the great human stories, exalt its heroes and condemn its villains, but most of all to draw forth
the crucial lessons VistA has to teach about medical informatics, community building, and the effective
(and sometimes ineffective) management of large-scale projects. We will be opening up a discussion forum
shortly to collect your VistA stories, launching select research projects, and publishing the interim
results on this web site on the road to a definitive history book. We ask for your help in making this
project succeed. Meanwhile, here is an initial sketch of VistA's history for your comments.
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How Old Is VistA?
The name "VistA" (Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture) dates back only to 1994,
when the Under Secretary for Health of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Dr. Ken Kizer, renamed what
had previously been known as the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP). Mainstream media articles
frequently but erroneously report that VistA was invented and installed in 1994. The VA, in its official sketch of
VistA's history in the introduction to the VistA Monograph, reports
VistA's history as beginning in 1985, the year by which computers at all VA Medical Centers were up and running.
Prior editions of the VistA Monograph placed VistA's origins in 1982, the year VA Administrator Robert P. Nimmo
signed the Executive Order organizing and managing the DHCP. George Timson, one of the architects of VistA who has
been involved with it since the early years of its programming, wrote an extensive essay on the struggle to get VistA
officially adopted by the VA. His indispensible
The History of the Hardhats essay on
The Hardhats website pushes VistA's genesis back to 1977, helping shed
light on a crucial age of struggle. 1977 is the same origin cited by Dr. Robert Kolodner in his 1997 book
Computerizing Large Integrated Health Networks: The VA Success, an expensive but very interesting
collection of essays from diverse VistA experts. Yet ultimately, VistA's origins go back before the start of
programming to conception and design, right back to President Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Social Security
Amendments Act, commonly known as the
Medicare Act, into law on July 30, 1965.
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The Four Ages of VistA
The recent history of the VistA medical information system is fairly well known in limited circles, even though
there has been no systematic description of the changes and improvements that have been introduced over the past
dozen years. The origins and early history of VistA's medical information system technology architecture, however,
is relatively unknown. The VistA system, which evolved within VA medical centers and field offices throughout the
1980s and 1990s, and in parallel within the hospitals and clinics of the U.S. Indian Health Service, Department of
Defense, and Musti Consortium of Finland, was initiated and planned at the beginning of the 1970s by the National
Center for Health Services Research and Development of the U.S. Public Health Service (NCHSR&D/PHS). Its
history falls into four remarkably coherent ages:
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1965 - 1975: The Age of Cooperation
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1965 - 1972: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare --> Systems-Technology Strategy
Following the legislation establishing the Medicare program in 1965, the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW,
reorganized on May 4, 1980 as Health and Human Services)
needed to address many issues in health-services
delivery that had not been explicitly part of its
responsibilities up to that time. Several different agencies within HEW
launched projects in health-services research, to
establish a baseline of data and information from which the changes in
health-services delivery patterns, quality, and cost
could be identified and tracked. |
In the second half of the 1960s, one of these organizational units, the
Health Care Technology Division of what was soon
reorganized as the National Center for Health Services Research and
Development (HCTD/NCHSR&D), conducted studies by its staff and
independent researchers on the state of the art in
medical-information systems, and how these systems could improve the
quality of care, contain costs, and provide
health-services data in a consistent way across many institutions. The
NCHSR&D, created in May 1968, was an agency of the
Health Services and Mental Health Administration (HSMHA), which in turn
was an agency of the U.S. Public Health Service under HEW. The
NCHSR&D is known today as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
(AHRQ).
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By the beginning of the 1970s, the staff of the Health Care Technology Division had developed a very clear
understanding of what was needed in order to foster the efficient development of clinical-information systems and
their usage for improving medical care. The staff had studied in depth the few successes and many failures of the
early efforts to build medical-information systems, and had carefully evaluated the effectiveness of the many
medical-information systems research projects that they had funded in university medical centers. In 1972, Dr.
Charles Post of the HCTD staff reported the findings of these studies at the Fall Joint Computer Conference of
the American Federation of Information Processing Societies
(AFIPS,
dissolved in 1990). By that time a systems-technology
strategy had been formulated and initiated by NCHSR&D to address
the software-systems infrastructure issues that the
studies had identified. |
1972 - 1975: U.S. Departments of Commerce + Health, Education, and Welfare --> Systems-Architecture
Design
The National Center for Health Sciences Research and Development then turned to an agency of the
U.S. Department of Commerce to turn that systems-technology strategy into a
systems-architecture design: the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, reorganized in 1988 as the
National Institute of Standards and Technology). Through an interagency agreement
with NBS's Institute of Computer Sciences and Technology (ICST, a precursor of today's
Information Technology Laboratory), the National Center undertook to fund the
development of a technical synthesis of the systems
facilities that were proven to be effective in the various medical-information systems research projects. These
software-systems capabilities were to be combined into a software-systems architecture design that would enable
various medical-information systems applications to be integrated into complete, modular, clinical-information
systems for institutions.
In addition, the roadmap for the implementation and full development of
this approach, along with the systems software design
specifications, and also the implementation support program methodology
and documentation, were to be developed in an open,
participative process. |
By 1975, this project at the National Bureau of Standards under the direction of Joseph T. O'Neill had developed
the desired design and specifications, with technical cooperation from an agency of HEW's National Institutes of
Health (NIH): the Division of Computer Research and Technology (DCRT, which in
February 1998 became the Center for Information Technology, or CIT)
directed by Dr. Arnold Pratt. The technical development
had been conducted in accordance with a concurrent-engineering
methodology, and had developed the design and technical
specifications in an open, consensus-based process, supported by a
formal finite-state-transition specification and a
prototype implementation. Several hundred physicians and systems
scientists from many university medical centers,
research centers, and other organizations cooperated in providing
suggestions and comments on the various documents and
specifications throughout this specification refinement process. 
And as a proof of concept, the U.S. Navy's clinic at the
Brunswick Naval Air Station had used an early version of the system
software to develop an operational, automated,
clinic-management and medical-record system that was "paperless". |
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hospitals of the U.S. Public Health Service's own PHS hospitals in
major U.S. seaports logically would have been the
initial institutions in which this medical domain-specific
information-systems architecture could have been
deployed for its first phase of operational development and refinement.
But in the latter half of the 1970s, these federal
hospitals were in the process of being closed down, so the PHS had to
look elsewhere. |
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1975 - 1982: The Age of Struggle
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1975 - 1982: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare --> Veterans Administration Software
The largest pool of federal hospitals was in a U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services division, the Veterans Administration
(VA, later to be elevated to cabinet status as the Department of Veterans Affairs). The VA's Department of Medicine and Surgery
(now known as the Veterans Health Administration, or VHA),
under the farsighted leadership of Dr. John Chase, the
VA's Chief Medical Director, with the assistance of Warren MacDonald,
former legislative director of the American Legion,
picked up the work that had been pioneered by the PHS
and the NBS, along with Mr. O'Neill and more than a dozen of the key
persons that had worked on the PHS-funded
systems-architecture design and clinical-application prototypes. This
team developed in the late 1970s a clear plan and
methodology for the decentralized evolution and refinement of the
various clinical- application modules, and their
progressive integration into a complete medical-information system for
a hospital or clinic. The program was launched in 1978
with the deployment of the initial capabilities for the implementation
of the modules in about twenty VA Medical Centers. This
plan and program was renamed the Decentralized Hospital Computer
Program (DHCP) in 1981. |
The early going of this implementation effort within the VA ran into some formidable bureaucratic snags, but the
physicians in VA Medical Centers, with leadership from the National Association of VA Physicians (NAVAP, renamed
NAVAPD in 1989 when Dentists were added) and its
Executive Director, Dr. Paul Shafer, made sure that the VA understood the importance of clinician-directed
clinical-information systems development and refinement.
Congressman Gilbert "Sonny" Montgomery, Chairman of the
Veterans Affairs Committee of the
U.S. House of Representatives,
working with cooperation from other senior Congressmen
and the Veterans Administration's Deputy Director Charles Hagel, was
effective in clearing the path for its further
development and progressive evolution into its present full
capabilities. These efforts were assisted markedly by
the intervention of F. Whitten Peters and Vincent Fuller of the Williams and Connolly
law firm. They established at the
beginning of the 1980s that the software existing in the VA, derived
from the PHS projects, was legally in the public domain
and must be made available without proprietary or other restrictions to
other government and private-sector organizations for
their use. In December of 1981, Congressman Montgomery
arranged for the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program
(DHCP) to be written into law as the medical-information systems
development program of the VA. VA Administrator Robert
P. Nimmo followed up on February 18, 1982 with an Executive Order
describing how the DHCP was to be organized and managed within the VA's
Department of Medicine and Surgery. |
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1982 - 1993: The Age of Expansion
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Parallel Developments: IHS, DoD, MUSTI, and International Adoption
In parallel with the VA development and use of this PHS-derived system, the Public Health Service physicians and
facility managers in the Indian Health Service were the first to deploy it
throughout their hospitals and clinics, and developed the Resource and Patient Management System
(RPMS)
clinical-integration model that they shared with their VA colleagues.
The VA adopted this PHS clinical-integration approach and incorporated it into the PHS/VA system that
would be renamed the VistA system.
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The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)
in the early 1980s also experienced bureaucratic obstacles impeding its
effort to adopt the system from the Veterans
Administration and the Indian Health Service. But with Congressional
encouragement and support undertook to confirm the
capabilities of the system by a major program of comparison testing
among multiple commercially available
hospital-information systems in several DoD medical treatment
facilities. The PHS/VA system was tailored to the same
functional specifications as the other commercially available systems,
so that the comparison would be fair and objective. 
This modified PHS/VA system, renamed the Composite Health Care System
(CHCS),
emerged from the comparison test as not only the most capable in functionality but also the much less expensive
alternative.
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Meanwhile in the early 1980s major hospitals in
Finland
were the first institutions outside of the United States to adopt and adapt the VistA system to their
language and institutional processes, creating a suite of applications called MUSTI and Multilab.
Since then, institutions in Germany, Egypt, Nigeria, and other nations abroad have adopted and adapted the
system for their use.
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1993 - 2004: The Modern Age
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1993 - 2004: The Later History of VistA
The four major adopters of VistA--VA, DoD, IHS, and the Finnish Musti
consortium--have each taken VistA in a different
direction, thereby creating related but distinct dialects of VistA--VA
VistA, RPMS, CHCS, and the Musti software. VA VistA and
RPMS have exchanged ideas and software repeatedly over the years, and
RPMS periodically folds back into its code base new
versions of many VA VistA packages, so those two dialects are the most
closely related. The Musti software has drifted further
away from these two but retains compatibility with the infrastructure
of RPMS and VA VistA (while adding some outstanding GUI
and web capabilities that VA and IHS would do well to adopt).
Meanwhile, CHCS's code base diverged from VA VistA's in
the mid-eighties and has never reintegrated. In addition, until
recently CHCS's development was brought to a complete
stop by political opposition within the DoD. VA and DoD have been
instructed for years to improve the sharing of medical information
between the two systems, but have nevertheless for
political reasons managed to make little progress toward bringing the
two dialects back together. Thus, at present the VistA
code base is split four ways. This has resulted in a corresponding split in the
focus of VistA-related strategic planning. That is, as the
software dialects have diverged, so have the problems and opportunities
their respective adopters face, and therefore so has
their attention. Today, none of the four can be said to be focusing on
the needs of the entire VistA community. This schism is
not caused by a lack of interest on the part of the major adopters, but
reflects their entirely understandable focus on meeting
the needs of their immediate clients.
Fortunately,
the same spirit of initiative and volunteerism that originally helped
launch VistA led many VistA professionals to band
together as the Hardhats, a name the original VistA programmers used
for themselves. The Hardhats have worked to help make
the FOIA release of VA VistA more useful to the world outside the
borders of the big four adopters, and to encourage
cooperation among them. The Hardhats are historically the only
organization to have seriously explored a universal
perspective on VistA. WorldVistA was formed to augment the Hardhats.
Because the Hardhats have no formal legal existence,
there are certain activities like pursuing grants, letting contracts,
and making formal alliances, that they cannot pursue.
Therefore, the original WorldVistA board of directors, in order better
to pursue the OpenVistA project, incorporated WorldVistA
March 1, 2003 as a non-profit corporation, to extend the Hardhats'
reach into more formal arenas.
By the early
years of this Twenty-First Century, this freely
available medical information systems software capability, conceived by
the U.S. Public Health Service to provide a common and
available national resource for clinical-information automation, and
nurtured into maturity by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the
U.S. Indian Health Service, and the MUSTI Consortium of
Finland, now represents the joint achievement of
thousands of clinicians and professional systems experts from the
United States and other nations, who have contributed
their ideas and software components to this system.
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