VA Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest – $9M in prizes

Anyone want to burn three months on an unpaid spec? :)

* The replacement product will, as a part of the overall VistA EHR, deliver privacy, security, data integrity, patient accessibility, interoperability and other services required by federal law, regulations and VA policy. Many of these services are delivered by other components of VistA.

* VA intends to replace the current MSP with a scheduling product[1] which is a standards-based, modular, extensible and scalable, certified as compliant and fully interoperable with the production version of VistA now held by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), http://www.osehra.org/.

So the app won't have to replace everything...and it may get away with interfacing with some of the more easily interoperable aspects of the system. The main goal behind the contest is "To encourage development of systems that help Veterans schedule appointments to receive care from the Veterans Health Administration and to reduce risks in the future procurement and deployment of those systems"...which is vague enough to include a range of ancillary software services. And I doubt the federal contractors who likely receive much bigger amounts to maintain legacy systems would want the VA to install a system that makes them obsolete.

And on a more subjective note, large sums of money have been awarded to other government ChallengePost winner that were essentially proofs of concept and are barely functional today, if ever heavily used.