DOTmed Industry Sector Report: EMR/EHR

by Joan Trombetti, Writer | March 25, 2009

records industry. Some are confusing and some are redundant.
Some share subtle differences. The following terms
were provided by Dr. Eric Fishman. Dr. Fishman noted these
terms are most frequently utilized to describe the process
of documenting information concerning the medical care of
patients.

Automated Medical Record
Used only infrequently at present. It was an early stage of
'automating' the process of medical documentation.

EPR
Electronic Patient Record is similar to Computerized Patient
Record. It is an older term and is remaining popular largely
because of the Medical Records Institute, the entity which
runs the TEPR convention "Towards an Electronic Patient
Record' TEPR is now in its 21st year.

CPR
Computerize Patient Record - Defined as a computer-based
record that includes all clinical and administrative information
about a patient's care throughout his or her lifetime. The
documentation of any practitioner ever involved in a person's
health care would be included in the CPR, extending
from prenatal to postmortem information. This is one of the
original phrases for what was until recently called the EMR,
but is now generally referred to as the EHR.

CMR
Computerized Medical Record - This term is relatively infrequently
used in this century. However, in the 1990s it was
more common.

CCR
Continuity of Care Record - This is a standard of 'interoperability,'
which has recently become popularized. It is a 'snapshot'
of a patient's care which can frequently be downloaded into a
thumb drive or other very small portable memory storage device,
and brought by a patient to various health care facilities.

PHR
Personal Health Record - The emphasis in the PHR is on
the individual patient. With a PHR, patients can frequently
carry around a thumb drive or card holding digital data to
their various physicians, having each physician add to the
data.

EMR
Electronic Medical Record - This implies a level of sophistication
above a "Document Management' system. Not only
does an EMR allow you to create documents within your
office, it allows you to import information from a variety of
external sources.

EHR
Electronic Health Record - This implies a sophisticated level
of interoperability with the community. The implication of the
"health" as opposed to the "Medical" in EMR is that it is a
longitudinal record of an individual patient's health record.

This section was Provided by Eric Fishman, MD