What is AHLTA?

AHLTA is DoD’s Electronic Health Record, which serves 9.3 million DoD beneficiaries with a life-long longtitudinal electronic health record.

See http://www.ha.osd.mil/AHLTA/

AHLTA is being designed, developed, tested, deployed, and sustained by the Defense Health Information Systems (DHIMS) Program Office.

See http://www.health.mil/Pages/Page.aspx?ID=13 and  http://dhims.ha.osd.mil/

Northrop Grumman is the current systems integrator.

The Life Cycle Cost Estimate for AHLTA is several billion dollars.

See  http://www.health.mil/Pages/Page.aspx?ID=13

See also my publication at: http://www.ehealthdesigns.com/?page_id=246

AHLTA was designed to encourage clinicians to enter structured documentation using the MEDICOMP MEDCIN structured notes writer, along with free text.

AHLTA also employs a single Clinical Data Repository and Health Data Dictionary, licensed from 3M.

The idea was that by collecting structured, coded documentation, data would be computable and available to improve population health.

Requiring clinicians to enter structured data has met with some resistance as detailed by Maggie Mahar at http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2008/08/ahlta-continues.html.

However, Ms. Mahar does not have the complete picture, and her analysis is one-sided.  

See my comments to her post at http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2008/08/ahlta-continues.html

A plan is being executed which will improve the AHLTA graphical user interface, improve performance, and continue to integrate AHLTA with the Veterans Health Administration’s VISTA electronic health record.

Tens of thousands of clinical encounter notes per day are being collected in AHLTA the Military Health System.

The challenge remains on how to use this data for analysis and improved outcomes.