The Veterans Administration on November 16, 2016 released a Request for Information (RFI) titled “VistA Standardization, Virtualization, Consolidation, and Security Remediation” (VA11817-N1781-000docx).
There are 130 VistA systems in the U.S supporting over 1,200 VHA hospitals and clinics. Each VistA has over 2,700 files, 64,000 data fields and 1,300 print templates, 9,100 options structured across 1,700 menus, 3,300 remote procedure calls, 38,000 routines, and 4.7 million lines of code.
VistA Evolution (VE) is a joint effort with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) www.va.gov/health and the VA Office of Information & Technology (OI&T) www.oit.va.gov to improve the efficiency and quality of the VA’s healthcare by modernizing VA’s health information systems.
Under the leadership of the VE Program, planning is underway to address the requirements as listed in the RFI. There may be more than one contract solicited for the required scope of work to achieve the VA’s objectives.
The VA is conducting market research across industry to identify solutions and services to:
- Standardize disparate VistA application instances on a single code base to be used VA-wide
- Update the FileMan Application Programming Interface (API) to correctly and fully describe all applications data, thereby allowing applications to read/write data through a standardized VistA Data Dictionary
- Segment and isolate the business logic layer that is currently throughout all layers of the VistA environment while preserving the current business functionality
- Improve intrusion monitoring and auditing of VistA while closing gaps in application level security and vulnerabilities to VistA data
The plan is to consolidate the six Regional Data Centers where VistA is hosted into a single Service VistA production cloud instance. The VistA cloud shall support FEDRAMP/FISMA HIGH with sufficient load balancing and disaster recovery of VistA components to support 99.9% reliability. The cloud environment will also need to support Platform and Software as a Service (PaaS and SaaS), and support the VistA development, testing, and pre-production environment.
For more information, go to www.osehra.org. Click on RFI for Vista a post by President and CEO of the “Open source EHR Alliance” (OSEHRA), Seong K. Mun PhD.