Although many people—even employees of the healthcare industry—use the terms EMR and EHR interchangeably, they are distinct terms that deserve further explanation. In fact, they are interdependent concepts which play critical roles in all areas of health care. According to Webdmemr.com, some simplified definitions are as follows:
EMR: “an application used by Doctors (HCPs) and other clinicians to store, organize, and access all patients’ clinical data for a particular hospital or practice. In other words, the application used by an entire practice or hospital to legally store patient records electronically.”
EHR: “a patient centric application where long-term and aggregate health information from one or more encounters in any health care delivery setting is stored. Because an EMR only stores data from a particular hospital or practice, an EHR allows a patient to store data from any health care delivery encounter. ”
In other words, while an EMR is the actual legal record of a patient’s history for use by medical experts at a single organization, an EHR is the “friendlier” version of an EMR—the aggregation of this data to make it as accessible as possible to all necessary parties involved in the patient’s care across many locations. These include not only healthcare workers but insurance company and government employees as well. In fact, it is becoming common practice to make EHRs available to patients themselves.
But although an EHR may seem like just an improved version of the EMR, this is not the case. The needs of doctors and nurses when it comes to entering and documenting medical information will always be unique and critically important. If EHRs replace EMRs, doctors and nurses will be forced to use the same software as insurance company workers, etc. for communicating about a patient’s history and care. This sounds like a dangerous idea when you consider the esoteric detail necessary for doctors to share information effectively, as opposed to the more abstract, general, and financially-focused information needed by others involved. EMR and EHR software should always remain separate and specifically designed for the workers who will be using it, in order to ensure the most accurate and thorough communication and documentation possible. Not only is healthcare about life and death—it gets more complicated day by day with the progress of technology and science. This means a gap is always growing between the pools of knowledge held by doctors and nurses versus other workers in the healthcare industry; this gap is represented by the difference between EMRs and EHRs.
According to HIMSS Analytics, there is still a great deal of work to be done to improve EMR systems in order to reduce and prevent medical errors. An effective EMR program consists of complex interchanges between various standardized components. CDOs (care delivery organizations) must agree on and adhere to a uniform CMV (controlled medical vocabulary) in order to improve patient care. In addition, EMR systems require a uniform CDR (clinical data repository), a CDSS (clinical decision support system), and CPOE (computerized provider order entry). Only when these EMR components are effectively working together and enhanced by optimal software can accompanying EHR systems be implemented and improved, since any information passed onto the EHR is based on communication from the EMR.
As healthcare workers of all kinds become more and more dependent on computers for documentation, it’s critical for EMR and EHR planners and software developers to strive for systems which differentiate between the communication needs of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists versus other workers and even patients themselves. The overall quality of our nation’s healthcare depends on it.
By Joyce Kelly SEO copywriter on staff with CWP Tech Solutions, your Maryland Medical Facilities Goto IT Outsourcing Solution
Computer Repair Services in Frederick Maryland by
CWP Tech Solutions Inc
1446 W Patrick St Frederick Maryland 21702
301 662-6219
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Here is a related article and interesting pie chart that shows what vendors are calling their EMR (EHR) product: http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/medical/ehr-vs-emr-whats-the-difference/