VistA Support and Integration Expertise – Continued
This is fourth in a series of blog posts highlighting DSS’s experience and success stories supporting the VA and improving Veteran care and outcomes.
DSS, Inc. is without question the premier integrator of commercial software with VistA. In this article, we’ll focus in on the experience our team has in providing proven infrastructure support to the VA.
With over 10 years’ experience implementing VistA in commercial, hosted (internal and external) health care environments, our IT Infrastructure staff is a leader in VistA implementations and operational support. Our infrastructure strategies meet all requirements of our Federal, State, or County customers, and we can support different configurations based on customer need. Our deployments range from customer-hosted deployments to SaaS/ASP models.
In fact, DSS pioneered hosting VistA applications in an ASP environment. We utilize the latest virtualization technologies to provide a secure, flexible solution for system and application access. For robust security, data is secured both in transit and at rest via SSL/TLS and/or OS/DBMS or storage layer encryption respectively. DSS IT staff familiarity and daily use of technologies like Citrix and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Remote App can complement existing VA resources so they may be freed up to assist with EHRM efforts.
Our hosting experience covers application services for over 11,000 users at over 130 facilities nationwide. We provide our commercial distribution of VistA as a service (VaaS) system on top of the country’s most trusted cloud provider’s infrastructure specifically tailored for Government hosting, Microsoft Azure Government.
Microsoft Azure Government holds the most certifications of any cloud provider; tailored to address critical U.S. Federal, State, and local government compliance standards, it is comprised of hardened, geo-redundant U.S. datacenters, located at least 500 miles apart from each other and staffed by screened U.S. persons. DSS, Inc. exercises care in the selection of our hosting vendors in their scale, corporate stability, and longevity are factors in the selection process.
These are the reasons we host on Microsoft Azure Government systems. Snapshots/full backups can be provided of the entire system by Microsoft in the unlikely event that changes to the hosting environment or vendor be required due to any issue faced by Microsoft Corporation requiring datacenter closure or move.
For Faster Care Online Patient Self-Scheduling (OPSS), DSS meets the 99.99% availability Service Level Agreement (SLA) by utilizing various cluster technologies, including Availability Sets within the VA Tenancy at Azure. This ensures maximum uptime from a Continuity of Operations (COOP) perspective.
While the VA goes through a critical, multi-year transition EHRM period, it will need proven IT partners to ensure that the day-to-day delivery of healthcare services to Veterans is maintained.