The virtual VISTA COMMUNITY MEETING, Fri. Feb. 20 - Sun. Feb 22, 2026
Nancy Anthracite
The page for scheduling is up here:
https://worldvista.org/Conferences/43rd_VistA_Community_Meeting
As you will see, it is pretty empty right now, but it will fill up and hopefully, you would like to help fill it.
There has been a very substantial loss of VA personnel who help to maintain VistA and as you undoubtedly know, the VA is in the process of replacing VistA with an Oracle Cerner based EHR which does not support all of the things VistA does. There have been innumerable problems with this, but they are still pushing ahead while trying to keep VistA alive for those still using it, which is most of the VA.
Meanwhile, others outside of the VA are using VistA with great success, most notably in my mind the country of Jordan. EHR Hakeem is based on VistA and is in their public, military and oncology hospitals and clinics and is still growing. They have also built out a remarkable expansion of ancillary services and education to go along with it, all of this while on a razor thin budget as Jordan is hosting millions of refugees and does not have oil to help fund what they do.
It is also being used in the US and in India in particular. US regulations are making it harder and harder to use in the US because of the cost of maintaining certification, etc., is nearly impossible for open source communities.
There are many inside the VA who have ideas and maybe even prototypes of software to improve and modernize VistA that have not and probably never will see the light of day. I hope those folks will take the time to tell us about it.
This conference is focused on open source uses of VistA and health related software, and supporting software, such as M innovations. It is not a conference for those to try to sell their products to the VA. It is unlikely the VA will have any interest in buying anything VistA related in any case, but those who use open source VistA outside of the VA and especially those willing to contribute to the community with open source solutions that have been and will be useful for VistA and other health care focused needs are particularly encouraged to contribute. For example, you can find presentations about the use of AI and open source software in open source lung cancer screening as a for instance in the list of talks from the 2024 meeting here:
https://worldvista.org/Conferences/42nd_VistA_Community_Meeting and the use of the ICE immunization forecasting software at IHS, and not used but readily available to use with VistA.
We hope to have several presentations on international interoperability, especially with FHIR and SNOMED. VistA has extant and nacent capabiity to support that and we hope there are those who would like to discuss fleshing out that capability.
Please feel free to reach out to me with your ideas. Use the email and telephone number below to do that. Presentations are usually 45 minutes with part of that for questions. Presenters are asked to allow us to record and post presentations and slides.
BTW, the WorldVistA web site tends to go down temporarily about once a day, but should come back up within 10 minutes.
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Nancy Anthracite, MD
President, WorldVistA