VistA on GT.M team looking for friendly users

There is a fine line to be walked between satisfying the "Release Early, Release Often" mantra of the open source free software movement on the one hand, and on the other, having enough functionality for the software to be worth trying. The volunteers porting FOIA VistA to GT.M (http://www.sanchez-gtm.com) feel that they are now ready for friendly users to try the software. If you are an M programmer experienced with VistA applications, or with Kernel and Fileman, this may be your chance to help the team.

The significance of VistA on GT.M on x86 GNU/Linux is that it represents a complete and proven stack of open source free software for healthcare that can scale from the needs of a small clinic to those of a large teaching hospital.

FOIA VistA for GT.M is available at Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/hardhats) as is the open source free software GT.M for x86 GNU/Linux (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sanchez-gtm). Please use the appropriate support forums at Source Forge to request assistance and report anomalous behavior. In particular, Network Mail and HL7 Messaging are not yet functional. There is information at Source Forge under both the CVS link and in the Docs section on getting the source code from CVS. This VistA code should work with GT.M on any platform, not just GT.M on x86 GNU/Linux. You should use GT.M V4.3-FT06, the field test version of the forthcoming production version V4.3-001.

An extract from an initialized VistA database will hopefully be posted shortly in the VistA area of Source Forge. If you have an existing VistA database under Cache, Maury Pepper has posted in the Patches section a Cache program to export a database in GT.M's ZWR format. His program should be straightforward to convert to other dialects of M.

If you are able to render assistance to others who request it, please do so; the team of volunteers thanks you. For now, Ed de Moel (demoel @ users.sourceforge.net) is acting as the ibrarian. So, if you have a fix, even if you have write access to the CVS repository at Source Forge, please do not commit your changes. Instead, please submit them in the Patches section, and send an e-mail to Ed telling him to look for them.

Kudos to the entire team, and especially to Rick Marshall, Dave Whitten and Chris Richardson, for making this happen. It is their hard work and dedication that makes this possible.

Regards
-- Bhaskar
k.bhaskar@sanchez.com