John Halamka, Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston, praised the new alliance, saying that it could work synergistically with efforts in Massachusetts to make computerized healthrecordsystems work well together and that it could result in new uses for those computerized records.
It forced long-time hospital administrators with tight schedules and deadlines to loosen up and collaborate with a network of free agents open source programmers who voluntarily support a publicly available electronic healthrecord called VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture).