The End of AHLTA?
By
Bob Brewin
The Military Health System may have finally decided to get rid of its electronic health record system called <a href=http://whatsbrewin.nextgov.com/2009/03/ahlta_maybe_not_a_noun.php>AHLTA</a>, which military clinicians loath and what S. Ward Casscells, who served as the Defense Department top doc from 2007-2009, described as being <a href=http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0908/092908wb.htm>"hard to learn and use, slow and often down"</a>. Officials are looking to replace the system with some (hopefully) easier to use commercial software.
The Military Health System may have finally decided to get rid of its electronic health record system called AHLTA, which military clinicians loath and what S. Ward Casscells, who served as the Defense Department top doc from 2007-2009, described as being "hard to learn and use, slow and often down". Officials are looking to replace the system with some (hopefully) easier to use commercial software.
In a Special Notice tucked away inside the FedBizOps digital closet on Aug. 12, MHS Tricare Management Activity said it wants to find commercial outfits capable of modernizing AHLTA.
The notice said MHS wants an "interoperable set of EHR capabilities automating health care in a continuum of care settings including: inpatient acute care, ambulatory care, intensive care, emergency department, expeditionary (wartime, peacekeeping, disaster relief, and humanitarian) and ambulatory surgery."
The agency also wants a system that will provide patient identity management, e-mail between patients and their clinicians, and share data with the Veterans Affairs Department and health care systems connected to the National Health Information Network.
Since the Defense Department operates 59 hospitals and 364 outpatient clinics worldwide, and has more than 9 million health care beneficiaries, this is the kind of announcement that should attract attention from a slew of commercial contractors, including Epic Systems (the EHR supplier to Kaiser Permanente, the largest private health care organization in the country), GE Healthcare, Siemens as well as Google and Microsoft.
If MHS goes for a pure commercial play, it might be able to modernize its EHR system for a price tag measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
But, and I fear this will happen, if MHS taps an inside-the-Beltway contractor to adapt commercial software to its needs, it could end up paying billions of dollars for software delivered late. Does this make me a cynic or a realist?