2014 Underground Railroad Banquet in Bethesda, MD.

Join us for a wonderful evening of comraderie, food and drink at the Sep 3, 2014 VA MUMPS Underground Railroad banquet, continuing our efforts to promote grass-roots, bottom-up, open source, evolutionary systems design thinking even in the face of the "Logic of the Beltway."

We will be meeting at the Positano Restaurant in Bethesda, MD. just one Metro stop away from the OSEHRA Annual Summit.

Ticket prices includes admission to the event, a coupon for a free drink, (cash bar available), appetizers, and an Italian dinner. We will have a vegetarian option, please contact the restaurant for any special dietary needs. We'll have lots of stimulating conversation, and (limited duration) after dinner speeches. We'll be presenting awards for outstanding contribution and support to VistA technology.

The VA MUMPS Underground Railroad got its name in 1982 when Chief Medical Director Donald Custis first saw what would later become VistA. Having been told that only centralized computers and staff could create a program as complicated as an EHR, Dr. Custis was amazed at what he saw, and said, "It looks like we have an Underground Railroad here." We adopted that name, printing up business cards and holding banquets to honor those who contributed to the VistA development. The Hardhats were the technical group who created the software; the Underground Railroad is the group provided recognition to a broader community of users and developers, as well as organizational supporters of the effort.

We envisioned an open source, decentralized system based on standardized, vendor-independent hardware. We pioneered a NoSQL, email in clinical practice and clinical exchange, metadata-driven architectures, and what would today be called Semantic Web technology. We leveraged the tremendous scale of the VA's clinical staff for feedback in the design of our evolutionary approach: start with something that was "good enough," get it into the hands of real users, then "make it better."

The recent media attention to VA Scheduling problems often criticizes "ancient" software. The real blame, however, lies in the management of the software: the failure to "make it better."

This banquet is a continuation of a tradition, begun in 1982, when we awarded then VA Deputy Administrator an "Unlimited Free Passage on the Underground Railroad" certificate.

Here are some videos from the 2011 Underground Railroad banquet,

and here is the complete set so far.