The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) Innovation Sandbox Cloud and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Interoperability and Integration Innovation Lab are teaming up to create a vendor-neutral health IT innovation network. The network is designed to stimulate development of new ideas and shorten the time required to bring new solutions into practice.

The two will aim to address interoperability issues, accelerate the development of integrated health IT solutions, provide an unbiased environment for testing new products and help train the IT workforce needed to move the industry forward. The two organizations will connect innovation facilities and allow researchers from both organizations to collaborate on specific projects. The researchers will use the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), VHA’s electronic health records system, to test new products and solutions.

“We believe that together we can do something really unique and important,” Steve Rushing, director of Health@EI2, a health care innovation initiative at Georgia Tech, said in a statement. “By connecting our interoperability innovation lab to the VHA’s Sandbox Cloud, we can create joint project teams to work on specific challenges, work together to address industry issues and develop best practices, and test applications designed to run with the VA’s robust electronic health records system.”