Comprehension Healthcare Info Vernacular

Understanding Medical Records Vernacular

In the news, on this blog, and in other places, you’ll see different terms (and their acronyms) used when describing various types of patient medical records. MedeFile, for instance, is a PHR or Personal Health Record. I thought it useful to explain the different record types and how they differ. This should help you understand how different types of medical records are used, which should help you not only better understand the types of records out there, but how they might come into play when you’re talking to your health care provider.

Electronic Health Record

An EHR is also known as an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) or computerized patient record (never acronym’d for obvious reasons). This is a systematic collection of electronic health information about patients or populations of people/patients in digital (computerized) format. The primary concern of an EHR is to be able to provide information across different health care settings, usually in an enterprise-wide (hospital or care network) setting.
Most EHR data is used to streamline workflow in a facility, such as a hospital or care network, and for scientific and population-specific study. In the first case, it will be the system used by a hospital to track patients, billing, care status, and so forth. In the second case, it might be used for scientific inquiries into populations of patients with a specific disease, of a demographic, etc. so that statistics can be drawn.
Few Electronic Health Record systems are being used (less than half of all physicians were accessing one by 2008), but recent incentives from the government under the HITECH Act (2009) are going to change that as health care providers ramp up their adoption in order to comply with new Medicare requirements to go into effect in 2015.

Electronic Medical Record

Very similar to an EHR, an EMR is usually a specific patient’s record in a health care organization (doctor’s office, hospital, care network). Unlike an EHR, however, the EMR is centered more on the patient and health care provider’s needs rather than the organization’s needs. It’s not uncommon for EMRs to be a part of a larger EHR system.
Think of an EMR as the electronic version of your patient record and file on the shelf at your doctor’s office. Despite the obvious advantages and uses for an EMR, they are fairly uncommon, with less than half of all doctor’s offices using an EMR in 2008. Adoption of these systems has been slow.

Personal Health Record

MedeFile and our competition are Personal Health Records. These are patient-initiated (and controlled) medical histories and records that are maintained by the patient (or a proxy). These records can be paper-based or electronic, though today’s use of the term usually puts a PHR as an electronic record versus a PMR, which is usually on paper.
A PHR is a record rather than a system for keeping a record. It’s a patient-controlled version of an EMR whereas a EHR is a system for keeping records rather than the records themselves. The concept of a PHR is not new, but has only recently become common as people begin to take charge of their own health care rather than rely on faulty memory and a medical system that has generally failed to keep up with the Information Age.