DSS announced it will open source the code for its vxVistA electronic health record (EHR) framework, providing their version of VistA under a commercially-friendly open source license that can be used to unite the VistA community.

Mark Byers, president and CEO of DSS, said "vxVistA is being released as open source software at a critical time in this country's history. The health care crisis is one of the major challenges facing this country. VistA deployments in the private sector have demonstrated that VistA can provide private hospitals and clinics with the highest quality Electronic Health Record in the shortest amount of time -- for a fraction of the cost of competing products."

As an integral part of its actions, DSS applied for membership in the Open Health Tools (OHT) Foundation. OHT is a non-profit organization for open source health care projects. The vxVistA EHR framework will be part of the OHT Forge project.

The OHT Foundation is modeled after the Eclipse Foundation. vxVistA will be released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). By using the EPL, all members of the VistA community, including competitors, will be able to use vxVistA as the core framework for their products and innovations.

In addition to being released under the Eclipse Public License, vxVistA's framework will follow that of the Eclipse Foundation. Companies will be able to collaborate to build products by programming and packaging plug-ins, modules and extensions to vxVistA's core framework.

vxVistA is a commercial implementation of an enhanced version of VistA, the award-winning Enterprise-class health system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). DSS has added over 100 enhancements to the VistA core.

vxVistA is also available in an Enterprise version, which includes DSS-developed modules for professional services, support and training.