VA Hospitals Sign HP To $784 Million IT-Support Deal

The Department of Veterans Affairs has tapped Hewlett-Packard to support information systems at VA hospitals throughout the country and in the Philippines. Under a 10-year, $784 million deal announced today, HP will provide support and maintenance for the VA's Vista Health Information System.

Vista is a centralized system that automates record keeping at all 178 VA hospitals. It's deployed on clusters of HP Alpha servers running OpenVMS software. VA officials say rising clinical and administrative workloads led them to seek an expanded services arrangement with HP, which has provided IT services to VA hospitals since 1983. More than 4.5 million patients received care at VA facilities in 2002 and 6.8 million people are enrolled in the VA health-care system.