The military medical community continues to make more and better use of AHLTA, its electronic health record system, but more should be done to meet the needs of patients and providers.
That was the message conveyed by Dr. David Parker, director of clinical integration and informatics at Northrop Grumman Corp., to a forum on the defense health information system sponsored by Georgetown University this week.
“We are sharing more nonbilling data than any other health organization in the world,” Parker said. “We are capturing more detailed clinical data than anyone else.”
The Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, or AHLTA, is the Military Health System’s EHR. Northrop Grumman is MHS’s prime contractor for AHLTA development.
Parker noted that AHLTA’s Clinical Data Repository includes more than 35T of information, and more than 3T are added each week. Seventy million outpatient notes are included in the system, and 120,000 are added each day.
In addition, more than 4 million clinical terms, 170,000 abnormal symptoms and 150,000 abnormal clinical examination findings are captured daily.
Some health care providers, Parker said, object to the level of structured data that is included in AHLTA. But “AHLTA is not about structured data,” he said. AHLTA provides clinical providers the ability to record free text, Parker said, and 30 percent of all AHLTA data appears in that form.
Parker said much AHLTA training overemphasized the recording of structured data.
Other improvements that can and should be made, Parker said, include increasing the speed of AHLTA and its modules, becoming more responsive in providing new functions requested by health care providers and filling in missing data.
“Inpatient data is spotty, as are images,” Parker said. “Civilian care is virtually absent from the system even though we have the data.
“Integration with the civilian world is the next big frontier for AHLTA.”
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
