Health IT at the Defense Department
The Department of Defense is no better when it comes to active duty servicemen, according to NextGov:
The Defense Department's top health officials lambasted the department's central electronic health record system that manages patient files for millions of active duty and retired service members, saying it frustrates doctors because it crashes as often as once a week and generates duplicate records.
[The system called AHLTA] stores the health records of 9.2 million personnel in a central data repository, which runs on an Oracle database and stores 25 terabytes of data. [But,] the Army Medical Department has faced "near mutiny" from clinicians who are dissatisfied with AHLTA, particularly its interface and templates used for note-taking.
According to Maj. Gen. Charles Bruce Green, deputy surgeon general for the Air Force, "AHLTA also is slow, unreliable and so cumbersome that clinicians spend 40 percent of their time inputting data into the system, which is time spent away from patients."
Another good post exposing more health IT myths.
Joe, there is nothing wrong with health IT. Problem is that the VA and DOD experience with it has been overhyped.