Difference between EMR and EHR

The market has confused the electronic medical record (EMR) and the electronic health
record (EHR). Government officials, vendors, and consultants have propagated this
confusion, in some cases unintentionally. The definitions that HIMSS Analytics proposes
for these terms are as follows:

Electronic Medical Record: An application environment composed of the clinical data
repository, clinical decision support, controlled medical vocabulary, order entry, computerized
provider order entry, pharmacy, and clinical documentation applications. This environment
supports the patient s electronic medical record across inpatient and outpatient environments, and is used by healthcare practitioners to document, monitor, and manage health care delivery within a care delivery organization (CDO). The data in the EMR is the legal record of what happened to the patient during their encounter at the CDO and is owned by the CDO.

Electronic Health Record: A subset of each care delivery organization s EMR, presently
assumed to be summaries like ASTM s Continuity of Care Record (CCR) or HL7 s Continuity of
Care Document (CCD), is owned by the patient and has patient input and access that spans
episodes of care across multiple CDOs within a community, region, or state (or in some countries, the entire country). The EHR in the US will ride on the proposed National Health Information
Network (NHIN).