User:Butch
My name is Butch Whitby. I've done a lot of things in my lifetime, including auto mechanics, carpentry, working on computers, and 5 years ago becoming a father.
I have been working with computers since I was around 8 years old. I went from playing Kings Quest III, on a dos machine, to learning how to use SCO UNIX, all before I was 10. I'm not even going to get into my experience with the Commodore 64...and that blasted program where you used the turtle to draw things on screen...then there was the Tandy, with the dual cassette drives...
Over the years I have learned a great deal about computers, and have played around with a lot of hardware, and operating systems. I use Windows strictly as a gaming platform, and even thats rare anymore. I have been through probably 2 or 3 dozen different Linux distros over the years. 2 years ago, I finally settled on Solaris 10 as my main OS, and more recently (November 2008) moved to OpenSolaris as my OS of choice.
I became aware and interested in VistA after meeting Steve Watson, in February 2009. I became a member of World VistA in June 2009, and have greatly enjoyed the networking, communication, and comradery with everyone else invloved.
VistA definitely has the potential to change medicine and the way that things are done. Of that there is no doubt. Getting it in a useable form, into the hands of the doctors who need it the most. That is the real challenge. What I mean by useable form, is when you consider that we live in a Windows world, and there is a GUI for everything...as soon as you present a command line to the average computer user, they are either going to laugh, cry, or ask you whats wrong with your head. That is the mindset that we often have to deal with. I don't mean VistA specifically either. I'm talking novice computer users in general.
Great strides are being made with VistA. I look forward to seeing the day when we succeed, and VistA is THE software of healthcare in the USA. Not because of a government mandate, that is only going to cause people to try and find something else, out of pure spite. Because VistA has become the most useable, well polished, and timesaving tool in the modern health practicioners arsenal, and they wouldn't work without it.
