Since
the HIPAA deadlines have now come and gone, the majority of the
government's attention towards medicine in the United States seems
to be focused on Healthcare IT and specifically on the relatively
new buzzword - 'EHR.' For those of us who have been in the
industry for a number of years, you know that we have been calling
the systems designed to digitize medical records - 'EMRs' or
'Electronic Medical Records.' The term 'Electronic Health
Records' seems to be referring to the same thing, but are there
fundamental differences between an EMR is and an EHR, or are we all
just talking about the same thing? (You say Po-Ta-Toe, I say
Po-Taw-Toe, Lets call the whole thing off)
Interchangeable Terms? Chad Bungard,
the deputy staff director and chief counsel for the House Government
Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, was asked just earlier
this week what the differences are between the two terms. He
responded by saying, "I have found that many people mean different
things when they refer to an EHR or an EMR... the terms 'electronic
health record' and 'electronic medical record' are interchangeable
terms..." So Chad Bungard acknowledges that they are pretty
much the same thing, right? Well, not so fast...
The Whole or the Part? In a recent interview published
the following day, Dr. John Halamka (who just happens to be
the chairman of the Health IT Standards Panel and Harvard Medical
School CIO) clarifies his perception of the relationship
between the two terms.
"Generally, the distinction is that an EHR is made up of two components: a personal health record that includes patient-contributed information
and an EMR. I think of an EHR as representing all health care data about a person over their lifetime of care, contributed by many authors—including the patient from the inpatient, outpatient and emergency environments—while an EMR is a clinician's tool for maintaining data about a patient in their practice."
So according to Dr. Halamka it sounds like the EMR is the system
that houses the digital clinical records while the EHR is both the
patient clinical data and the system together. Confused?
For Our Purposes. As a healthcare
IT reseller, the main thing we need to understand is that an EMR and
an EHR are both talking about the system that stores, catalogs, and
digitizes their medical charts. Though it may also be true
that the term 'EHR' encompasses both the system and the data, it
won't matter which term that we use when discussing our
solutions with a medical practice. As Bungard says the terms
are "interchangeable." Still, some food for thought
- maybe an
EMR becomes an EHR once the doctor begins entering real patient data
in it. Hence, a doctor purchases an EMR and then transforms it
into an EHR simply by using it.
-- Kevin Burdick,
InvestMedLLC.com
May 2006, TOP STORY:
InvestMed - 2 Years and Counting
March 2006, TOP STORY:
What's in an EMR?
