EHR vs. EMR – Which is it?

February 11, 2017
Niko Skievaski President & Co-Founder

I use the terms interchangeably. But back in 2010 when I started at Epic, I learned the term as “EMR” (electronic medical record). Recently, along with the rest of the industry, I’ve been attempting to rewire my neurons and move to using the term “EHR” (electronic health record). It’s proving to be more difficult than I thought it’d be. It’s like a new fashion trend that suddenly made you the weird guy for wearing pleated pants. Just as you can’t iron out pleats, we can’t simply shake the old EMR term.

I ran a quick Google Trends query on EHR vs. EMR to see where we’re at as an industry in terms of fully embracing that “H”. While its usage is still neck and neck, EHR is definitely on the right side of history, and, in my opinion, the term that should be widely used.

EMR was the original way to describe the systems used to document and bill for medical care, but as they bloated with features, their name needed to broaden beyond the restricting confines of “medicine” to the more general term “health”.

When the Office of the National Coordinator made the official switch to the term EHR in 2011, they accompanied it with a post describing why. Essentially, they switched because Meaningful Use, their policy, defined an EHR as something that extends beyond the walls of the immediate organization to provide care to all involved in patient care, including the patient themselves.

The electronic medical record was designed to streamline workflows within the four walls of the healthcare organization. In contrast, the broadened definition to share data—to interoperate—with the entire care team, including the patient, meant we needed to broaden the term; hence, electronic health record.

This new definition of EMR changed it’s name to EHR, but just like the adoption of the new term, we’re still climbing an uphill battle. More and more people are beginning to use EHR, and it’s important that we make the distinction as to why we’re using the new, more cohesive terminology. We may still be the kid wearing those pleats, they’re starting to get ironed out.

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