Conversation with Ralph Johnson, Ward Cunningham, and Tom Munnecke about refactoring VistA
Channel: Tom Munnecke
Date: 2011-10-27

Ward Cunningham, best known as the inventor of the wiki, invited me to his home for dinner last Friday night.  Ralph Johnson, a world-class leader in object oriented programming technology, pattern languages, and refactoring, happened to be his house guest.   The after dinner conversation turned to a spirited discussion about how to refactor the VA VistA Electronic Health Record system, so I turned on my iPhone to record the discussion.

Ward Cunningham is also well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, in particular the use of pattern languages and (with Kent Beck) CRC (Class-Responsibility Collaboration) cards. He is also a significant contributor to the Extreme Programming (Agile) software development methodology. 

Ralph E. Johnson is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

Tom Munnecke was one of the original software architects of what is now known as VistA, the VA's electronic health record, as well as CHCS, a similar system for US Department of Defense hospitals world-wide.

The discussion revolves around the future software architecture of electronic medical records in the federal government, now being coordinated as an open source project as the Open Source Health Record Agent http://osehra.org

For a less technical discussion of the Wiki phenomenon and the VistA electronic health record, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSnCN-HQXvI