(CITPO), an acquisitions office for centrally managed MHS clinical information technology systems supporting the U.S. military. (In 2008, CITPO was combined with the TMIP-J Program Office to form the Defense Health Information Management System, or DHIMS.) It began worldwide deployment in January 2004. Unique to AHLTA was the entry of more than 2 years of historical health information for each beneficiary upon the creation of their EHR. This information, transferred from legacy systems, facilitated continuity of care. AHLTA has been deployed in Phases, or "Blocks", of increasing functionality that allows the MHS to build a system that is easily adapted to meet evolving requirements and to incorporate the latest available technology. Block 1 provided the foundation of system: performance through a graphical user interface for real-time ambulatory encounter documentation. It enabled retrieval of a beneficiary's health record at the point of care. By December 2006, Block 1 had been fully deployed and was in use by more than 55,000 MHS care providers in 481 Army, Navy and Air Force treatment facilities worldwide, including Combat Support Hospitals and Battalion Aid Stations in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Block 2 (AHLTA version 3.3) was released in December 2008 and integrated robust dental documentation and optometry orders management capabilities (the Spectacles Request Tracking System, or SRTS). Version 3.3.3.X with client update 9.1 is currently fielded to physician and clinic staff workstations. The original plan was to phase in replacements for the CHCS Ancillary modules. However, these blocks of AHLTA were defunded. Subsequent blocks will modernize legacy system ancillary services (laboratory, pharmacy, and radiology), order entry and results retrieval, inpatient documentation, and interface exchange with other MHS information support systems. Operations Master Patient Indexing is a feature of the AHLTA Clinical Data Repository (CDR). Over 100 CHCS host systems, DEERS (the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System), and AHLTA-Theater (the version being used in Iraq and other areas) all contributed patients into the CDR when it was created from 25 months of data pulls back in 2004. Each CHCS patient registration links into AHLTA, some link to existing patients, but others are newly created. Complexity with patient names and methods of identifying them with other demographics can lead to duplication, both in a local CHCS system and in the central AHLTA CDR. There is currently a DHIMS contract aimed at improving the processes and automating the routines to resolve duplicate patients and prevent