Re: It will be interesting to see what Oracle/Cerner does with the VA VistA EHR replacement
I looked around VistA's system assisted by a company that wanted to add remote medicine, outside client intake, and outside billing to VistA years ago now, and have to agree that an Oracle - Cerner choice is a far removed second place from VistA.
One reason for staying with Cerner will be hospital board inertia and lack of technical familiarity (IT hospital board members are not doctors and therefore plebian) and functional knowledge (do doctors even understand how hospitals work) of VistA. Another reason to choose Cerner is the prestige of owning a system from Oracle (honestly that's the way some hospital executives think).
Hospital staff begrudgingly accept or happily embrace VistA for its comprehensive coverage of any hospital, not just the VA.
Its also more secure out of the box at least partly due to its architecture having been ported from a System 38 to MUMPS and C. VistA should be the hospital application that resides in the cloud and sold as a services to smaller, more vulnerable hospitals to hacking.
However, decision makers being doctors...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
