In the front and center debate about Healthcare Reform, both Electronic Health Records, (EHRs) and Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) have seemed to take a bit of a back seat. However, now that the dust has settled on the Reform Bill, practicing physicians need to be reminded that more than a year ago, before the passage of Healthcare Reform as part of the original stimulus bill, President Obama created incentives and set asides for implementation of EHR and other HIT solutions. If you have not thought seriously about Electronic Medical Records, now is the time to start.

First some definitions. If you have at all looked into an EHR solution then undoubtedly you have come across several different terms. EHR, EMR and PHR – it can all start to seem so much like alphabet soup. As already stated, EHR stands of Electronic Health Record. The earlier accepted term was EMR for Electronic Medical Record – and now there is another solution commonly referred to as a Personal Health Record or PHR. There are technical, albeit subtle differences between the three.

If you do not understand the differences, you are not alone – the terms are often misused interchangeably even by those who sell the products!

Particularly between EHR and EMR, there may seem to be little or no difference, but there are clearly defined technical distinctions, and you need to be aware of these because the incentives in the Health IT portion (also known as the HITECH ACT) of the Stimulus Bill, are based on what defines an EHR.

In 2003 Health Level 7, part of the American Standards Institute was given the responsibility by the Institute of Medicine to come up with a precise definition of an EHR. HL7 based its definition on functionality. It defined an EHR as an integrated system that had to have over 100 specific capabilities and levels of function. The point of HL7’s definition was the idea of integration and that an EHR was a system that accomplished all of the specified tasks. HL7 made it clear that all of those operations did not need to be provided to the hospital, facility or medical office by a single vendor.

So in other words, you could get the software that runs your patient information services such as appointment reminders and lab result notifications from one vendor, and your e-prescribing software from another, as long as they all work together in a single functional system. This is the main distinction between an EHR and an EMR. In fact, according to HL7’s definition, an EMR can be part of the entire EHR solution.

These subtle distinctions may seem trivial, but they all become important as certifying bodies search for what will define “meaningful use” that will guarantee that a given EHR solution will qualify for the incentives in the HITECH Act. This idea of Electronic Health Records as an integrated system was backed-up by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Furthermore, the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), the non-profit organization that has been given the contract by the federal government to certify EHRs, currently uses the original HL7 critera as the core for issuing its certifications.

With incentives that are becoming available, and with every medical practice being forced to streamline, cut expenses, and do more with less – over the next few years, the decision to implement an EHR solution will likely be one of the most critical to any practice.