Edmond Scientific Company Presents at the OSEHRA Summit

EDMOND SCIENTIFIC COMPANY Presents Veterans Administration Contest Submission at OSEHRA Summit

Developers Charged with Creating Open Source Solution for the VA Challenge.gov Contest for Scheduling  

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) challenged software developers to create new systems that schedule appointments in VA’s nationwide health system. This challenge was presented through a Medical Appointment Scheduling System (MASS) Contest, hosted on the site Challenge.gov, with the VA awarding as many as three prizes for the creation of an open-source and open API-based system to replace components of VA’s 25-year-old scheduling software in its VistA electronic health system.

Edmond Scientific Company sat on the Hewlett Packard team of developers, spending 4 months developing the Patient Scheduling Solution and Demonstration for the HP contest submission.  An Edmond spokesperson says “Patient Scheduling was considered not to be a standalone application and considerable cost would be in the integration  of the network services interfaces.  This integration was also critical to the success of our solution. CalDev was selected as the protocol because it consists of a set of new methods, in addition to WebDAV, for use in HTTP.  In accordance with the contest parameters, specifications as standards helped our team understand the functionality in working towards an Open Source solution.”

The MASS Contest was driven by VA’s decision to transition its VistA electronic health system into an openly architected product and to challenge developers to offer standards-based, modular components that can be extended and modified much more easily than customized products. Proprietary, commercial systems are eligible for prizes, but all entries in the contest will be required to have open connections, or APIs.

The VA plans to announce winners on or about September 30, 2013. Contestants, in order to be judged, will contribute the open APIs and any open source content in their entries to the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA). As the custodial agent for an open source community of VistA developers and users, OSEHRA plays a central role in the distribution and certification of VistA and VistA-related software.  VA will use the results of the contest to design final specification for an appointment scheduling system to be deployed nationally.

Submissions will be judged on the following criterion:

Entrants’ test scripts and product demonstration

Open Source Compatibility

Open Source Content

ABOUT EDMOND SCIENTIFIC COMPANY

Edmond Scientific Company (www.edmondsci.com ) is a professional services firm that creates innovative business solutions, and is a leader in the management, development and implementation of enterprise data security and privacy, data quality and integrity, data intelligence and analytics, and access control, to provide secure, interoperable solutions in the federal and commercial markets.