Perot Systems, Plano, Texas, has been awarded a contract to install a version of the Veterans Health Administration healthcare information-technology system, VistA, at 46 hospitals and about 500 healthcare clinics in the Middle East nation of Jordan, according to several sources.
The announcement was made about two weeks ago to members of the VistA Software Alliance at a meeting at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., according to an attendee, Peter Groen, a retired Veterans Administration IT expert and the former director of the health IT sharing program at the VHA. The alliance is a not-for-profit trade association formed to promote adoption of VistA system outside the VA. Perot is an alliance member.
Groen said that Duncan Pringle, Perot’s representative at the alliance meeting, “got up and said, ‘We’ve got the contract,’ and had the slideshow and kind of went through it in detail. When a guy is standing up and saying that to a room full of folks, it was pretty clear.”
Matthew King, a physician and chief medical officer of Clinica Adelante, a community health clinic in Surprise, Ariz., testified last week before a House Ways and Means health subcommittee “that a major U.S. systems integrator has just won the contract to provide all of Jordan’s public health system (46 hospitals, 500 clinics) with the WorldVistA EHR.”
King is a director of WorldVistA, a not-for-profit organization that has developed an open source version of VistA.
Joe McNamara, director of corporate communications for Perot said, “It’s premature for us to confirm or deny any of this. We just can’t go any more past that.” -- by Joseph Conn
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