The Soviet Encyclopedia, AHLTA Style

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.

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 (pages that included patient information were removed from this document). 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.