KW/VDL Plan

Strategic Plan for Augmenting VDL VistA Documentation for New Developers (me)

This is my plan for supplementing the massive VDL documentation for VistA.

I need, and I assume others will also need, a means of finding my way around the elements of VistA.

I have some difficulty wading through 150 page pdf documents and scrolling and I love short hyperlinked pages of good information, even things that I just gleaned from reading through one of the long pdf documents, so I can remember it two weeks from now.

I love the WIki concept and am working to become efficient and effective at using it.

Plans

• • Revise the master page of VDL Documents - KW-TOC - my version of the Table of Contents
  • Try to keep it complete - entries for each entry in the master page
  • Rearrange the Order to be more logical - in my judgement
  • Maintain links to the original documents on VDL
  • Create Summary Pages - One or two page-length, summarizing what is in the VDL documents
  • Add short descriptions of the documents, for someone not familiar with VistA's terminology
  • Create Glossary-type pages which define VistA usage of terms and include (searchable) alternative terms in general usage. For example linking words like encounter, visit, clinic-visit, telephone call - to PCE in VistA (or whatever is appropriate).
• Methods
  • Article Naming Convention - for now, I will try to keep this subproject separate by naming the articles KW-*
  • Section Overview Articles will be KW-PCE-OVR where PCE is the VDL identifier. The Article Name will be Descriptive, probably the names in the VDL Master Page for now.
• Future Plans
  • Ultimately Documentation needs to be segregated for clinicians, and various flavors of clinicians, versus technical documentation at various levels of detail.
  • A loose level of Determining this would be nicer than Rigid overall structure enforcement - and and some Planning and Enforcement is probably necessary.
  • Cross Linked hypertext (Wiki) pages allow a great deal of flexibility while allowing collaborative development of the documentation.