What Is an EMR?

The healthcare industry is being revolutionized by new technologies that modernize and streamline patient record-keeping, with the goal of making care more efficient and reducing medical errors.


One of these technologies is the EMR, or electronic medical record, and it may soon be replacing the paper versions of medical records that are commonly kept in doctors' offices and hospitals.


Most doctors, particularly in private practices, prefer paper records to electronic ones because they are cheap and simple to maintain. They often don't want to learn new technology, because the time spent doing so detracts from time and effort which they feel would be better spent on their patients.

The unfortunate downside to keeping paper records is that they are often less organized, require a vast amount of storage space, and are more expensive to maintain in some ways than electronic records.

The additional space needed to keep them, as well as the necessary supplies, can end up costing more money in the long run, though the startup cost is extremely low compared to the equipment necessary to maintain EMRs.


EMRs are often confused with EHRs, or electronic health records. The main difference between the two is that EMRs are maintained within a single organization for the purpose of keeping records for that organization's patients; EHRs, on the other hand, are designed to be shared between caregivers, and to be available for access anywhere that the patient might need to go for treatment.

EMRs tend to be utilized in situations where a person sees the same practitioner for an extended period of time, or in the case of specialists that are performing a single long-term treatment, whereas EHRs are better for maintaining a constant and all-inclusive record of a patient's overall health when they have visited multiple caregivers.

Organizations such as the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, are encouraging medical practitioners to implement the use of EHRs and EMRs because they are more portable, take up less space, and are typically more accurate than paper records.

Using an EMR can help doctors to eliminate confusion caused by illegible notes, and some experts feel that the initial cost of implementing the systems would be offset by the decrease in medical errors and unnecessary tests and treatments.

Until the systems are widely used in a variety of settings, it is difficult to say for certain whether this theory is valid.