The Military Health System will be introducing new imaging capabilities in the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA), MHS’ system of electronic medical records, in the next few months.
The first capability will allow easier retrieval of noncomputable files, such as scanned documents and photographs, from the MHS Clinical Data Repository. The CDR is a central database that stores all Defense Department health records. AHLTA is the application that retrieves data from the CDR.
“Clinicians can currently store images in the CDR,” said Dave Schroeder, MHS’ deputy director of health technology interagency sharing, “but they are difficult to retrieve. We would like to make it easier for clinicians to retrieve images at subsequent visits and in different locations.”
Later in the year, MHS will introduce similar functionality for viewing radiographic images to a small number of locations. This second phase of the project will be deployed worldwide during a period of several years.
The new imaging capabilities will be added by deploying a Web-based front end to the Documentum enterprise content management platform, according to Barclay Butler, senior vice president at Apptis, a technology integrator based in Chantilly, Va., and the prime contractor on the imaging project.
The imaging files will be placed in a separate registry in CDR, Butler said. The registry will enable clinicians to pull images up side-by-side with computable AHLTA data.
“The Web applications provide a much faster cycle time,” Butler said. “AHLTA operates in a client-server environment where the cycle time is quite long.”
Apptis recently awarded the document-viewing component of the project to AccuSoft, an imaging software developer in Northborough, Mass. AccuSoft tools will enable manipulation, such as rotation and colorizing, of the images.
“The key benefit of this effort is the reunification of the medical record,” Butler said. “These capabilities pull together records from all modalities to provide a complete medical record to the clinician.”
MHS is also working with the Veterans Affairs Department to make imaging available to VA clinicians through the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange, said Schroeder. A test project in El Paso, Texas, is already sharing radiographic images between the DOD and VA systems, he said.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
