Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) Explained

Medical records are almost as old as medicine itself and have evolved with the times. In recent decades, almost every healthcare provider has moved from storing patients’ paper records in filing cabinets to managing all that data (and more) in computer-based systems known as electronic medical records, which contain the medical and treatment history of each patient in a hospital or practice.

What Are Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)?

Electronic medical records act as a digital version of a patient chart, but they can include much more information. While most paper records were restricted to an individual’s medical history—illnesses, surgeries, medications, and so on— EMRs can provide standard templates for entering disease codes and billing information and for helping providers comply with various regulations. The data gleaned from EMRs can also be used for further research and analysis into illnesses, treatments, and hospital practices. Most EMRs incorporate high-quality imaging to aid diagnoses, and they can help reduce the likelihood of human errors caused by illegible handwriting.

To understand what an EMR is, it’s important to appreciate what it isn’t. It’s not the same as an electronic health record (EHR), even though the two terms are often used interchangeably.

While EMRs can contain most of the information and provide most of the benefits of EHRs, they’re generally kept within a single hospital or medical practice, and, in most cases, they’re not interoperable with one another. With an EHR, multiple departments, specialists, and care venues can access both the clinical information from the electronic record and data from labs, pharmacists, and therapists, giving them a complete overview of a patient to help them provide coordinated care.

EMRs Explained

EMRs can help make life more straightforward for healthcare professionals, administrative staff, and—most important—patients.

They can reduce the potential harm of paper records being lost or destroyed, and they can negate the importance of physicians having legible handwriting. In the past, illegibility has led to errors, such as a pharmacist thinking that a physician is prescribing a 70 mg dosage of a medicine when they actually prescribed 10 mg.

Administrative tasks are less arduous with EMRs, as they can provide fields for coding and billing details. They also provide prompts for clinicians to follow best practices, such as confirming that all the relevant paperwork is signed off on before a patient is discharged from their care.

EMRs can also give patients some peace of mind that their healthcare organization has a comprehensive overview of their entire medical history. This means that patients should not have to go through their medicines and medical histories each time they see a clinician, which can help give them confidence that they will receive suitable treatment for their conditions.

Moving from paper charts to EMRs has also helped improve efficiency, accuracy, and safety, and the data generated can help decision-makers improve the services provided, particularly when combined with information from EHRs.

EMR FAQs

What is the use of EMR in healthcare?
In healthcare, an EMR is used to securely input and store comprehensive data on a patient’s medical history.

What is the difference between EMRs and EHRs?
The main difference between EMRs and EHRs is that information in an EMR is generally accessible only within a single hospital, physician’s office, or other venue of care. With an EHR, the information can be securely accessed by all relevant members of an individual’s care team, regardless of department or venue, for greater care coordination.