AHLTA is a global Electronic Health Record (EHR) system used by U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). It was implemented at Army, Navy and Air Force Military Treatment Facilities (MTF) around the world between January 2003 and January 2006. It is a services-wide medical and dental information management system. What made AHLTA unique was its implementation date (early EHR adoption), its Central Data Repository, its use in operational medicine and its global implementation. There is nothing like it in the private sector. (According to the DoD, "AHLTA" was never an acronym, but is rather the system's only name.) AHLTA is an Electronic Health Record which was built to supplement the functionality in the Composite Health Care System (CHCS). CHCS is a practice management system (scheduling and finance) with Computerized Provider Order Entry. AHLTA allows providers to document clinical notes, place orders and select coding (ICD/CPT). Additionally, it provides secure online access to all Military Health System (MHS) beneficiaries records for nurses, corpsmen, medics, technicians, clerks and various office managers. The system links the U.S. military's 481 medical treatment facilities (MTFs) (including those deployed abroad) to the EHR, ultimately supporting 9.2 million MHS beneficiaries. It is the first system to allow for the central storage of standardized EHR data that is available for worldwide sharing of patient information. In addition, it provided data sharing between the VA and the DoD through a module called BiDirectional Health Information Exchange (BHIE). Since 2010, multiple improvements have been attempted to the base software correcting defects and adding new software modules. Version 3.3.8 included the ability to support ICD-10, and all prior versions of AHLTA were phased out. However, DoD health professionals continued to find AHLTA to be difficult to use, slow, and frequently subject to crashing, and in 2013 DoD began taking bids for a $4.3 billion, 10-year contract to overhaul the system. In July 2015, DoD awarded the contract to the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health, a consortium of EHR manager Cerner; management consulting and professional services company Accenture Federal Services; and engineering and technical government contractor Leidos. History The development of AHLTA is directly related to a Presidential Directive issued in 1997. The Directive focused on and reinforced the need for a centralized, longitudinal patient record for military personnel accessible across the DoD enterprise. AHLTA, previously known as the Composite Health Care System II, was developed by the Clinical Information Technology Program Office