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What is an EHR? Electronic Health Record

By on March 26, 2015

What is an EHR? Electronic Health Record

The terms EHR and EMR often get used interchangeably and I believe for all intents and purposes they can be used in a the same context.

However I believe the main difference between the two terminologies is the EHR(electronic health record) is a consolidation of the patients EMRs(electronic medical records) across all platforms and institutions.

The EHR is a complete holistic view of an individual patients medical history from lab results, radiology results, demographics, vitals and so forth.

An electronic health record (EHR),  uses specialized healthcare software in order to collect  information on individual patients.

Each patient has their own digital record that contains the same information doctors traditionally kept using paper.

The advantage of digital record keeping is doctors do not have to keep  track of physically filing all of the patient information.  As a result there are no papers or files that will get lost.

Specialized EMR and EHR software is able to record and track patient demographics as well as vital signs, health history, age, weight, allergies and insurance information to name a few.

One of the goals of EHRs is to be able to integrate with other healthcare IT systems for billing, laboratory information, radiology and other healthcare computer systems.  Integration is not limited to local information systems, but includes information systems in other healthcare institutions located anywhere.

Some of this information sharing is accomplished by utilizing industry wide accepted means of data transmission.  One such standard is called HL7 or Health Language 7.

There is a brief video >>>HERE<<< explaining what HL7 is and a brief blog about “What is HL7?” >>>Here<<<

About dkorolyk

I've been involved in Healthcare IT and PACS since Y2k. Over the years I've been fortunate enough to be involved in a lot of interesting an diverse projects. My experience also includes numerous HL7/EMR integration projects as well as many hardware and software platforms. My three main areas of expertise include technical integration aspects of radiology, oncology and laboratory diagnostics.

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