OpenVista CIS For Linux

OpenVista CIS is a Gtk# EHR for interfacing with VistA based systems (Medsphere OpenVista, VA's VistA, etc.)

OpenVista CIS is a rewrite of the Department of Veteran Affairs' Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) in Gtk#. The focus is on using a modern language, internationalization, and cross-platform support.

There are two major components to OpenVista, a client (Medsphere OpenVista CIS, commonly referred to just as CIS, OpenVista CIS, or OpenVista Client) and a middleware component (Medsphere OpenVista Bridge). The Bridge handles doing raw RPC communication with the VistA Broker and provides a SOAP (currently broken) and Binary Remoting interface to the client (the client uses one or the other for a given connection). The Bridge is meant to be run on a server (either one running VistA itself, or a separate machine), while CIS runs on a client machine (any machine with a .NET environment and Gtk# available).

There is another component, currently under development, called OpenVista Vitals. This will be both a stand-alone vitals application, as well as a component of OpenVista CIS when it is completed. Note that this project is *not* completed, and should only be considered a pre-preview of what is to come from the Vitals component.

A small portion of the CIS component is actually broken into a separate executable, PdfConverter.exe. This small utility acts as a remoting server, responsible for converting raw bytes of PDFs into GdkPixbuf bytes. This needs to be done out of process, as poppler (and by extension, poppler-sharp) is licensed under the GPL.

The PDFConverter.exe sources, as well as the few shared classes used for remoting, are licensed under a GPL compatible license. We hope in the future that a PDF library with a license less restrictive than the GPL will be available, such that we can increase PDF rendering performance by not having the rendering done out of process.