TOPICS

The Soviet Encyclopedia, AHLTA Style

By Bob Brewin bbrewin@govexec.com April 27, 2009

I've been poking around for a couple of weeks on a story that, in 2001, the Naval Medical Center in San Diego had developed a low-cost way to integrate the Defense Department's Composite Health Care System (now called AHLTA, maybe not a noun) and the Veterans Affairs Department's electronic health record system, the Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture (VistA).

My interest in this project -- and its potential application today -- was piqued by a white paper on the 2001 project by the small company that did much of the work, ESI Technology Corp. The white paper detailed how all kinds of nifty tools -- such as object oriented programming, Java and XML -- could be used to update the aging software which underlies both AHLTA and VistA.

The paper was stored on the ESI Web site -- until last week. Since I started making my inquiries, that 8-year-old paper disappeared from the site, and I don't think it was an accident. I think powerful forces are at work here, forces that don't want any alternative to the long and costly plans to develop a new and improved AHLTA now underway at the Military Health System.

RELATED STORIES

But I can foil those dark forces, because I have saved and will share with one and all the internal Nay report on that integration effort. Here it is. Let me know what you think of this approach.

Hmm. Didn't President Obama just call for development of a joint Defense/VA electronic health record system? Maybe this 8-year-old paper could help point the way.

What's Brewin' is now updated daily and published in blog format on Nextgov.com. Click here to read the latest entries.

VIEW ALL 4 COMMENTS POST COMMENT

COMMENTS

  • I think "Nay" report was supposed to read "Navy" report. VA Doc Posted April 30, 2009 11:47 AM
  • The blogger is confusing CHCS (aka CHCS I) with CHCS II (aka AHLTA). The report deals with integrating CHCS data with VISTA data in order to display them both within the same GUI visualization tool. CHCS and VISTA have their roots in the same MUMPS based system. Back in the time frame of this report (2001) the big issue for DoD was changing from the text based CHCS system to something a little more user friendly, a GUI or graphical user interface. Back in 2001, DoD still had more than a few computers that were still in DOS prompt mode so this was significant. The issue today is not how to simply display CHCS and VISTA in the same GUI, it is how do you integrate the data gathered in AHLTA (CHCS II) and stored in an Oracle based data architecture with the very antiquated VISTA system that still has MUMPS at its core. Joe G Posted April 27, 2009 5:21 PM
  • We don't need DoD to use VISTA to get AHLTA and VISTA to interoperate; we just need DoD to use VISTA as a data client. VISTA is freeware open source anyway; might as well use it as a data broker. Then businesses could trade on their ability to interpret data between the VISTA format and whatever format anyone wants to use. Basil White Posted April 27, 2009 10:51 AM
VIEW ALL 4 COMMENTS