New record-keeping program in use at Bolling Dental Clinic Published June 5, 2009 By Sharon J. Alfred Special to The Bolling Aviator AIR FORCE DISTRICT OF WASHINGTON -- Dentists at the Bolling AFB Dental Clinic in Washington, D.C., lead the Air Force in the use of the record-keeping AHLTA-dental program. ''We're the first clinic in the National Capital Region to have switched to the fully electronic record-keeping system," said Col. Ray Jeter, commander of the dental squadron, a part of the 579th Medical Group stationed at Bolling. The Department of Defense's electronic record-keeping program gradually will be used by all military-base medical clinics. Originally, AHLTA (pronounced ''alta") was an acronym for Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application. However, Colonel Jeter explained, medical articles soon noted that the meaning behind the acronym was linguistic nonsense. ''Now, the word AHLTA is used as a noun rather than as an acronym," he said. The dental teams at the Bolling Dental Clinic see approximately 70 patients per day, and the full utilization of the AHLTA-dental record-keeping system means that its manpower need not be tasked to perform physically pulling medical records anymore. The AHLTA dental program represents progress for the dental teams on the base since the program allows the dentists to gain instantaneous access to patients' records via computers, so that physical dental records need not be pulled before patient examination and treatment. From the patients' point of view, they will not have to fill out a medical history background every time they are treated by dentists at a different military base clinic. The password-protected AHLTA dental program will give up-to-date background information that the military health-care providers can access immediately. This new electronic system allows the dental teams to access the medical records of a patient to review anticipated treatment plans or make real-time notations onto these records. Colonel Jeter said that when all the Armed Forces dental folks can use AHLTA, the DoD envisions a future in which it will be possible for the treating dentist at one base clinic to make notes in a particular patient's progress⁄treatment reaction during the same-day visit to that clinic, and the very next day, it will be possible for that same patient to receive uninterrupted dental treatment at a different clinic on another base because this clinic also can access the same up-to-date dental treatment plan for that patient. At the Bolling clinic, Colonel Jeter said that ''at first, everyone was anxious about implementing and using the new AHLTA program." However, he said, both he and his dental teams discovered that the AHLTA program was ''easier, faster, and more stable than we initially feared," and that ''it was so much easier than we originally thought, so that by the end of the six-week period (the transition period to switch from making paper records to AHLTA electronic filings), we were already using the new system to document 96 percent of new medical intakes." An active dental practitioner on Bolling, Col. Nancy Motyka, residency director of Advanced Education in General Dentistry, said that she really liked the new AHLTA program. According to Colonel Motyka, the ability to use AHLTA's color-coded graphical chart in the treatment room (where oral surgery is performed) allows both the patient and the health-care provider to ''see" the treatment outlined for a specific tooth. Colonel Motyka also said that AHLTA makes it ''easy to read another's handwriting." She jokingly said that some doctors' penmanship was nearly ''indecipherable." ''With AHLTA, reading the record is no longer a problem, the words are plain to see," she said.