VistA Reporting and Dashboarding Solution

As anyone who has worked in healthcare and related support industries knows, it isn’t enough to treat patients and keep a record of their treatment; you must be able to document that treatment is appropriate, safe, delivered in the right way at the right cost, and that all appropriate laws and regulations have been observed. This means that, in addition to keeping an accurate record of each patient’s care, providers must generate an ever larger number of reports at daily, weekly, monthly and yearly intervals. As an industry-leading innovator in Healthcare IT applications, KRM has tackled the long-standing frustration of users who must produce reports from VistA.

In a large deployment of a VistA-derivative that required several dozen standard reports for monitoring prescribing trends, patient safety, and potential over-charges, the initial decision was to try to produce the reports directly from the M database, but the amount of MUMPS programming required was daunting. Using the FM2Caché built-in to carefully map the VistA packages to SQL allowed developers to write the data queries in standard SQL.

JasperSoft Studio

Report templates were created in Jaspersoft Studio, tweaked for desired output format, and then the SQL queries incorporated to pull data to populate the reports. The JasperReports Server dashboard allows the use of input controls to constrain and filter the data being pulled and, as indicated previously, the reports can be exported in a variety of formats including PDF for printing traditional static ‘snapshot’ reports and XLS for dynamic manipulation and filtering capability.

Our all open source stack for VistA reporting is as follows:

• Ubuntu 15.04 => latest
• TIBCO JasperReports server 6.0.1 => latest
• Apache Tomcat
• Postgresql
• Unity Desktop => (optional, used to troubleshoot Jasper locally)
• Caché Ensemble 2012
• JDBC Driver connection to Caché
• FM2Caché (Caché built-in) for mapping to SQL
• TIBCO JasperSoft Studio 6.1 => latest.