Ping-Pong with the Army Surgeon General

I strive for balanced reporting. When I received a copy of an internal Army message last month, which indicated, at the very least, poor management of the mental health records of soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, I took the time to carefully craft a query to public affairs personnel in the Army Office of the Surgeon General.

My editor, Katherine Peters, and I also wanted to provide the Army sufficient time to respond to an extensive query on such a sensitive topic. I sent that query on Jan. 31 and four weeks and three days later have still not received a reply to some key questions related to that message and the story we ran today.

The internal Jan. 11, 2011, Army message said Army units operating in Afghanistan and Iraq have become "saturated" with paper behavioral health records as mental health providers are not entering encounter data into the theater electronic health record.

The message directed that paper mental health records be packed and shipped to an Army installation in Texas for electronic scanning and eventual linkage to the Defense Department's AHLTA-Theater electronic health record.

This led me to ask some boiler-plate questions I thought the Office of the Army Surgeon General could easily answer. These questions included:

• How many pages of paper records were covered by the message -- hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of pages?
• How many soldiers were covered by the message?
• Why didn't Army behavioral health providers enter data into the AHLTA-T electronic health record?
• What percentage of behavioral health care in Afghanistan is documented in AHLTA-T?
• What percentage of behavioral health specialists in Afghanistan or Iraq have access to AHLTA-T equipment?
• How many pages of loose, unidentifiable documents might be destroyed, as the message directed?

I forwarded that reply to CENTCOM the same day, and on Feb. 18 talked to a CENTCOM spokeswoman who was somewhat puzzled as to why her command should be expected to answer such Army-specific questions. She said CENTCOM would punt the query back to the Army Office of the Surgeon General.

The spokeswoman for the Army Office of the Surgeon General acknowledged on Feb. 18 that she had received an e-mail from CENTCOM, sending my query back to the Army for answers, but she held out little hope that I would get any.

On Feb. 24, the spokeswoman for the Army Office of the Surgeon General did offer one answer to the above list of questions: As of that date, the Texas installation had received 32 boxes with more than 2,800 records from theater.

I'm still waiting -- without much hope -- for answers to the other questions.

Meanwhile, as I politely told the spokeswoman for the Army Office of the Surgeon General, this whole exercise has left me bewildered beyond belief.