The Military Health System is actively pursuing alternatives to AHLTA, its electronic medical record system.
MHS officials have already received the recommendations of Booz Allen Hamilton, the consultant it commissioned to study whether the Defense Department should switch to a system that more closely resembles the Veterans Affairs Department’s Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA).
The results of the study have yet to be released, but Dr. S. Ward Casscells, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs said that “we are going to make a call on this” within a matter of days.
At least part of that study involved the feasibility of developing a joint DOD/VA inpatient EMR, a Booz Allen executive said.
In a statement released July 22, Stephen Jones, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, said, “There is a strong feeling here and at the VA that the best approach is a convergent evolution of the two systems. This approach optimizes the strengths of both systems while creating interoperability that will drive more universal information exchange.”
The effort to find alternatives to AHLTA can be traced to a Webhall discussion MHS hosted June 20. Health providers posted more than 150 comments about AHLTA on the MHS Web site, and the majority were negative.
MHS officials addressed some of the participants’ concerns in a PDF document posted online. With regard to complaints about the system’s slowness, MHS officials said they were “doing everything possible to improve the users’ experience by addressing the speed, reliability and usability issues of AHLTA.”
They said their effort to address system performance includes standardizing desktop interfaces, adding memory and processing capacity to computers, optimizing queries to the database, and working with local operators on network issues.
Other problems include patient records becoming stuck erroneously at inpatient status in AHLTA. MHS officials attributed such issues to the system’s continuing reliance on the Composite Health Care System for the patient discharge function.
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.
