What is EMR/EHR?

EMR stands for Electronic Medical Records and EHR stands for Electronic Health Records.  Here is an advanced definition of the two different programs.

EMR vs. EHR: Definitions

The market has confused the electronic medical record (EMR) and the electronic health record (EHR). Government officials, vendors, and consultants have propagated this confusion, in some cases unintentionally. The definitions that HIMSS Analytics proposes for these terms are as follows:

Electronic Medical Record: An application environment composed of the clinical data, clinical decision support, controlled medical vocabulary, charge entry, computerized provider order entry, pharmacy information, drug interactions, and clinical documentation applications. This environment supports the patient’s electronic medical record across inpatient and outpatient environments, and is used by healthcare practitioners to document, monitor, and manage health care delivery within a care delivery organization (CDO). The data in the EMR is the legal record of what happened to the patient during their encounter at the CDO and is owned by the CDO.

Electronic Health Record: A subset of each care delivery organization’s (medical offices) presently assumed to be summaries of the patients Continuity of Care Record (CCR) or HL7 s Continuity of Care Document (CCD) which both can be simply called the patients electronic health record.  This record is owned by the patient and has patient input and access that spans episodes of care across multiple CDOs within a community, region, or state.

The EHR can be established only if the electronic medical records of the various CDOs have evolved to a level that can create and support a robust exchange of information between stakeholders within a community or region. While some forms of early EHRs exist today in limited environments, it will be difficult to establish effective EHRs across the majority of the US market until we have established clinical information transaction standards that can be easily adopted by the different EMR application architectures now available.  This is one reason why hospitals are interested in implementing a program that can be adopted among their employed and networked physician groups.  It provides for an easy exchange of information.  HL7 compliant software is also becoming the gold standard for programs because of the ability to interface between numerous applications.  X-Link is a private organization that has built an information exchange platform that basically connects two programs together which allows the programs to communicate with each other and exchange information.  If you have two programs that are Hl7 compliant then you should be able to build an interface without needing to go through X-Link.  The issue is that if X-Link has the interface built then it will probably be much cheaper to use them rather than having the organization build a new interface.  For more information about EMR Interface check out our other posts.