Atlassian has supported hundreds of non-profits and open source projects with free community licenses. About a month ago, I was contacted by Fabian Lopez at DSS Inc, a company that has just launched their open source initiative using Atlassian’s community licenses.
DSS has developed and launched vxVistA, a “free, open source EHR system.” EHR stands for Electronics Healthcare Records, and the system they built will help streamline communication between healthcare providers. Competitive products are big, expensive, and costly solutions.
vxVistA is based on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system, which is used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to manage patient records. By open sourcing the software to community development, the new vxVistA can be modified by the community and even expanded for use beyond the traditional healthcare setting.
“We analyzed eight or ten different collaboration tools, but when we found the Atlassian suite, this was the obvious selection. Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence both offered a robust feature set that could be used for internal development as well as externally for the growing development community.” – Fabian Lopez, PMP, project manager for vxVistA.org at DSS.
On the VxVistA.org site, you can read how they built the site using Atlassian tools, but here’s a quick summary.
vxVistA.org uses the following components:
- Jira and GreenHopper for bug tracking and agile project management.
- Confluence as a content management system and community site for the vxVistA community to share and connect
- Crowd for single sign-on between the applications
- And product plugins, including Balsamiq Mockups and Gliffy diagrams
“The introduction of open source development in the EHR arena will change the way healthcare is delivered in the U.S.,” Lopez said. And that’s why we’re excited that our tools are involved!
Click the arrows on this sweet, simple interactive Flash demo to see how they’re using the Atlassian tools.
UPDATE: VIDEO OF WEBINAR HERE
