“Few hospitals go paperless using free VA: Electronic record system helps W. Va.”
Boston Globe files a story about use of the open source program for Electronic Medical  Records, VistA, which is the basis of the nation’s earliest and still one of the country’s largest and most successful large-scale EMR implementations. It examines VistA’s use for a statewide system in West Virginia, and with additional interview and reader comments discusses how “free” costs money, and the pluses and minuses of VistA implementation.

An Affordable Fix for Modernizing Medical Records
Wall Street Journal’s Laura Landro reports:  “Many start-up companies adapting VistA for commercial use, including Blue Cliff Inc., MELE Associates Inc., Sequence Managers Software and Medsphere Inc., say their systems will still be less expensive for hospitals to deploy. Medsphere, which put together the system for Midland Hospital, says OpenVistA enables hospitals to run system checks for security problems and bugs. And Chief Executive Mike Doyle says the open-source software community can quickly share information and patches to fix or correct them.”