What is the difference between an EHR and an EMR?

The distinction between an Electronic Health Record (EHR) and an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is fundamentally based on scope and comprehensiveness. An EHR is designed to be a comprehensive digital record that encompasses all the health information of a patient across various healthcare settings, enabling a seamless exchange of data between multiple providers, practices, and facilities. This interoperability allows for coordinated care among specialists and ensures that all aspects of a patient's health, including treatments, allergies, lab results, and imaging reports, are readily accessible wherever the patient receives care.

On the other hand, an EMR is typically limited to a single practice or healthcare organization. It contains the clinical data and history of patients as documented by that specific provider, but it does not facilitate sharing this information across different practices. Thus, while both EHRs and EMRs serve essential roles in healthcare documentation and management, the EHR is broader in nature and integrates a wider array of information from multiple sources, making it more comprehensive than an EMR. This inherent difference in the breadth and usability of records is what solidifies the understanding that an EHR is indeed more comprehensive than an EMR.