Pain relief: prognosis is not good for military's medical records system.

• Author: Jacks, Jason
• Position: Technology

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Military officials know that a program is in trouble when a congressional subcommittee proclaims it to be "intolerable."

The program is the Defense Department's electronic health records database, called the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, or simply AHLTA.

AHLTA was launched five years ago as a means to neatly compile the vast amount of medical records that the Defense Department had accumulated. Since then, the system has been plagued by complaints from doctors, nurses and other medical personnel of being too slow, complicated and unreliable.

"There has been a ton of dissatisfaction with that system, and it's not because people have refused to give it a chance," conceded Dr. S. Ward Casscells, then-assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, during a discussion earlier this year on the Army's medical department website. Casscells and his staff had been spearheading an effort to make AHLTA more userfriendly.

Casscells went on to say that recent changes made to AHLTA were not improvements, and were implemented later than promised.

"So people are a little bit annoyed," he said. "Basically, it's promises not kept."

The $4 billion system is the largest electronic health records database in the world. Seventy-seven thousand people key into AHLTA on a regular basis from almost 900 military medical and dental facilities worldwide, as well as from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and from two ships at sea.

It contains health records for about 9.2 million patients. In one week, the system handles 2.2 million prescriptions, 642,400 patient encounters, 102,900 dental procedures, 19,600 inpatient admissions and 2,100 births. As of May 15, 109 million patient encounters had been processed through AHLTA.

As much as AHLTA is used, it has been problematic making it avaible system.

Developed by Northrop Grumman Corp., the system was devised to rid the military's medical departments of laborious paperwork, to speed up medical personnel's encounters with patients and to centralize patients' records so they could be easily retrieved from anywhere in the world. Company officials declined interview requests.

Last summer, the Defense Department's Military Health System held an online forum that was supposed to gauge what users thought of AHLTA. Instead, the event morphed into a cathartic release of frustration by the more than 200 people who took part. Negative comments far outpaced those that were positive...