A friend who studies health delivery management for a living reports that the VA has, after billions of dollars and many years of effort, developed an electronic medical information system that (1) saves cost; (2) improves quality; (3) reduces delays; (4) reduces errors; (5) improves patient outcomes and (6, and most surprisingly) is popular with the people doing the work.
So why, in the scramble to develop a set of standards for national adoption, isn’t there active consideration of simply making the VA system the national standard? First, it was developed by the VA, which still has a bad reputation. Second, the technology is in the public domain, which means that none of the firms developing proprietary systems can hope to make money from it.
