PHR, EMR, EHR Soup

What's all this noise about a PHR? What does it do for me? Should healthcare organizations care? And what does it have to do with an EMR, an EHR, or any one of the other three letter acronyms that the health care informatics industry seems to be so smitten with?

Well, it turns out alot of people are asking themselves the same questions. So in an attempt to shed some light on the subject, I delved a bit deeper.

First I went to the NAHIT Key HIT Terms Report (that's The National Alliance for Health Information Technology Report to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on Defining Key Health Information Technology Terms, published April 28, 2008).

Through what I can only imagine was some gnashing of teeth, NAHIT managed to put forth the following definitions pertaining to the above acronyms:

Electronic Medical Record (EMR)
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.

Electronic Health Record (EHR)
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.

Personal Health Record (PHR)
An electronic record of health-related information on an individual that conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and that can be drawn from multiple sources while being managed, shared, and controlled by the individual.

In summary, EMRs and EHRs are tools for providers while PHRs are the means to engage individuals in their health and well-being.

And that leads me to the next place of interest, the PHR. More coming on this later.

tsd.