Every developer in health tech hits the same wall. You can get a sandbox that lets you read a chart. You can’t get one that lets you run a workflow: scan the wristband, scan the bag, program the pump, and watch the data come back.
The VA solved that problem for me decades ago without meaning to. VistA, the EHR that still runs most VA hospitals, is public domain. So I brought it home and built a medication pass around it, with OpenBedside feeding simulated pump data and AI MedAgent reasoning over the record.
It took a weekend and no license fees.
Get the pieces:
VistA for Docker (WorldVistA): github.com/WorldVistA/docker-vista
OpenBedside: github.com/danielpettus/openbedside
AI MedAgent: aimedagent.net
Daniel Pettus spent forty years in medical device and health IT leadership at Alaris, CareFusion and BD, contributed to IHE Patient Care Device interoperability standards, and is named on two United States patents. He writes Inside the Loop at insidetheloopdp.substack.com.
The serious version of the day job is a book. The Technology Was Never the Problem: forty years of trying to connect medical devices, what actually stopped it, and why the answer was never engineering. Paperback and ebook at pettusbook.com.
AI MedAgent is a research demonstration of a patent-pending method. Advisory only. Not a medical device. Not for clinical use. Simulated patients, synthetic data only. aimedagent.net
