All resources
EMR and EHR: what the two terms actually mean
The distinction is real, it is smaller than it sounds, and almost nobody applies it consistently — including software vendors, who will use whichever term the buyer used first.
Published
EMR — the record one practice keeps
An electronic medical record is the clinical record held by one practice about its own patients: history, examinations, diagnoses, prescriptions, documents, and what happened at each visit. Its natural boundary is the organisation that created it.
This is what nearly every clinic is actually buying when it replaces paper, whatever the software is called.
EHR — the record that is meant to travel
An electronic health record is the broader idea: a record that follows the patient across the organisations treating them, so a clinic, a laboratory and a hospital are contributing to and reading the same history.
Making that work is mostly not a software problem. It depends on agreements between organisations, on a shared way of identifying the same person, and on someone deciding who may see what. Software is the last part, not the first.
Why the labels are used loosely
EHR sounds larger, so it is the word that appears in marketing. A product described as an EHR is frequently an EMR that can exchange some data with something else, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to be — it is just not what the word promises.
Neither term is regulated, so no vendor is doing anything improper by choosing one. It does mean the label tells you nothing you can rely on.
The question worth asking instead
- Which specific exchange with which specific other organisation is running today, for a practice like mine?
- Can you show it working, or only describe the plan for it?
- If none is running yet, what would have to be true before one could be?
- Whatever the record is called, can I get my own data out of it?
Where to go from here
Every SkyEagle product line can be seen in a walkthrough, with its scope and any configuration or integration requirements explained.