U.S. Army mental health care providers who treat soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq are not consistently entering patient data into the Department of Defense's AHLTA theater electronic health record system, according to an Army Office of the Surgeon General internal message obtained by NextGov, NextGov reports.
Instead, Army mental health providers have been documenting mental health encounters on paper behavioral records. As a result, the Army has become "saturated" with paper records, according to the internal message.
According to NextGov, the Army lacks a system to scan and code the paper records so they could be searchable and retrievable from DOD's EHR system (Brewin, NextGov, 3/3).