I was going to write about the Institute of Medicine holding its first meeting as the entity tapped by the ONC to study the safety of EMRs. Or is it EHRs? I read a couple of articles and EMR and EHR were interchangeable. Has the industry finally reached a point where they are interchangeable?
I've differentiated the two in three categories - ownership, interoperability and content - but ownership is the thread. EMRs belong to the healthcare provider. EHRs are managed and owned by the patient.
EHRs are interoperable because they are designed to allow patients and the patient's multiple care providers to add patient data. EMRs are not interoperable because they belong to the healthcare provider, which is the sole entity that adds patient data to the record.
With respect to content, EHRs aggregate content from multiple entities. Since EMRs belong to the healthcare provider, the healthcare provider populates the EMR with its content.
Is it time to throw out the differentiations? Hospitals and health systems are extending their EMRs to connect to local physician offices, which means that those entities can add data to the EMRs. So if it's a matter of definitions, it may not matter if you call it an EMR and an EHR.
Does it matter? Give us your reason for why it doesn't or does matter interchanging the terms EMR and EHR.
Photo by The Ewan courtesy of Creative Commons license.
