An Embarrassing AHLTA Outage

I've been picking up rumors that the Defense Department's AHLTA electronic health record system crashed last month at about the same time as top military medical officials detailed the poor reliability of the system at a joint hearing of two House Armed Services subcommittees.

Rear Adm. Thomas Cullison, deputy Navy surgeon general, told the hearing that AHLTA goes down once a week, including, it turned out, the same day he was testifying (March 24).

A Military Heath System spokeswoman confirmed that on that day "there was a brief disruption in the Clinical Data Repository [designed to store 9.2 million medical records] resulting in approximately an hour of connectivity issues with AHLTA, however, the issue was addressed immediately. "

Mary Ann Rockey, deputy chief information officer of the Military Health System, told the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Chicago on Monday that Defense no longer intends to store all its electronic heath record information in one basket.

Rockey said that instead of using just the one Clinical Data Repository, MHS plans to move to a distributed mode, with the data housed in regional mini-data centers. Rockey did not say when the plan would go into operation. Cullison would probably prefer sooner than later.