I've given up. For years I've been tracking the common usage for the digital health records, back to the computerized patient record. It was hammered out by a worthy assemblage of industry academics and experts. Maybe it was because its acronym, CPR, lacked a certain ring--or maybe it was because it was the same as a common medical procedure. No matter. The name never really caught on. Nor did other variations.
Electronic medical record (EMR) captured the identity and differentiated itself from the paper-based medical record, i.e., the chart. I really thought the term was akin to set in stone when the federal government commissioned an industry trade group to identify and define key healthcare IT terms.
In that report, EMR was defined as "An electronic record of health-related information on an individual that can be created, gathered, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and staff within one health care organization." And separate from electronic health record (EHR), which is "An electronic record of health-related information on an individual that conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and that can be created, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and staff across more than one health care organization."
But the process was a total waste of taxpayer money.
According to the official definition, what vendors are selling and what healthcare providers are implementing is an EMR. But EHR dominates industry-speak. Even government documents refer to such systems as EHRs. What can you say? Not much, really. We can just all agree to use EHR as the common terminology and move on to more important discussions. Shall we start with how best to spark implementation across the country?
I don't know how many times I delivered a presentation/authored a published article when I had to explain why two healthcare information technology (HIT) trade groups (one so large that it won't be mentioned and the other, federally commissioned at taxpayer expense) developed definition differences between an electronic medical record (EMR) and an electronic health record (EHR) only to further confuse my healthcare professional audience / readership, who, for years, had a complete understanding that a “chart,” “record,” “patient record,” “medical record,” “health record,” etc., were synonymous! Walk into any hospital or clinician office and always one will hear an assortment of such phrases without ever questioning the meaning. Just because in the late 20th century a type of prefix, such as "computer," "automated," "electronic," or "digital" was needed to differentiate between an analog and digital chart made no difference to healthcare professionals. Again, all phrases were and always would be synonymous.
Thankfully, we are getting close to ending this nonsense, as Charlene pointed out in her recent blog. However, we must give the credit to the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) for dealing one of the final blows to this trade-group-made-up-debate. NOWHERE in this key legislation was a distinction made between an EMR and an EHR. Only the term “electronic health record” and acronym EHR was used—for health information exchanges, for hospitals, for physician offices………and every reader/interpreter of this legislation had a complete understanding of what was being conveyed.
