US military electronic healthcare record to be deployed by December 2006
21 February 2006
San Diego, USA. AHLTA, the US military's electronic health record (EHR)
was unveiled at the 2006 Annual Healthcare Information and Management
Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference and Exhibition last week. AHLTA is the
next generation EHR that has global reach and is unrivaled in its size,
complexity and capabilities. When fully deployed by December 2006, it will
allow beneficiary health records to be accessed worldwide at any military
treatment facility.
As of January 2006, the AHLTA Clinical Data Repository already contained
7.4 million beneficiary records, pre-populated with 25 months of laboratory,
anatomic pathology, pharmacy, and radiology data from MHS legacy systems for
MHS beneficiaries. Most commercial EHR implementations are "day forward"
systems, meaning that on patients' first encounters with providers, they
have an empty record, and the only data in their EHR is what providers
enter.
A principal reason for DoD's implementation of AHLTA is to improve care
for its MHS beneficiaries. These EHRs are patient-centric as opposed to
facility-based, gathering patient information from facilities around the
world into a single, durable record readily available to authorized
healthcare providers at the click of a mouse. Paper systems relied heavily
on patients to gather records and transport them to their healthcare
providers — a process that often led to lost, damaged, misplaced, and
incomplete records. Using this electronic method, DoD has identified and
resolved more than 165,500 potentially life-threatening drug interactions.
A key characteristic of AHLTA is its scalability. While it has the power
to support the 9.2 million beneficiaries in the MHS, this EHR is also able
to connect to a handheld electronic device operated by a medic who is
recording information on an injured or sick Service member half way around
the globe.
"Providing continuity of care is a challenge to our providers who serve
our highly mobile beneficiaries," said Army Col. Vic Eilenfield, AHLTA's
program manager. "AHLTA makes care continuity a reality by ensuring
beneficiaries have a complete single record that can be accessible at any
military treatment facility."
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