their creation in the future. AHLTA Characteristics Creates a lifelong medical record for TRICARE beneficiaries Offers an intuitive, graphical user interface designed by military providers to support clinical workflow Leverages structured documentation to maintain integrity of patient data and optimize data standardization Enables symptom-based medical surveillance Uses templates to simplify workflow Provides 24-hour, 7-day-a-week access to beneficiary EMR (assuming the network is working) Eliminates health record legibility issues Enables population health and wellness reporting Provides clinical functionality used in support of deployed service members, ensuring a "train as we fight" approach Ensures costly tests, labs and scans are not lost and needlessly duplicated Interoperability ensures records can be accessed at any MTF worldwide Prevents unauthorized access and protects from loss due to natural or man-made disasters Criticism AHLTA has been poorly received in some quarters. Described by some as "difficult to use", the Army's Surgeon General stated that clinicians "spend as much or more time working around the system as they do with the system". (Some military medical insiders facetiously attribute the phrase "Aw, hell! Let's try again!" to the acronym.) Current providers using AHLTA have become excellent at multi-tasking while using the application as it routinely takes 30sec-1min to load up each new tab that is requested. In 2017 insiders are still astounded that such a poorly designed and functioning system is allowed to remain. Most have given up and accepted that using AHLTA makes a 5min task take 10-20min. One problem with AHLTA is that many service members data are not captured and recorded (therefore lost), when the patient is referred to outside (non-DOD) civilian providers for care. The care from outside providers could be captured and incorporated into AHLTA from Tricare via billing codes and records, but it is not. Almost all health data recordings are missing from AHLTA once a referral to an outside provider is made. This represents an enormous amount of relevant medical data on service members missing from AHLTA and a significant limitation of the system. References External links DHCS webpage about all Defense Health Clinc Systems including AHLTA Electronic health record software United States Department of Defense