{"head":{"title":"What Is an EMR (Electronic Medical Record)? | OceanLab","description":"An EMR is the digital version of a clinician's paper chart, used inside one practice. How it differs from an EHR, an example and the mistakes teams make.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/glossary/emr"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Glossary","path":"/glossary"},{"name":"EMR","path":"/glossary/emr"}],"slug":"emr","term":"EMR (electronic medical record)","aka":["electronic medical record"],"category":"Health software","short":"The digital version of a clinician's paper chart: a patient's medical and treatment history kept within one practice.","body":[["An EMR is used by one clinic or practice to record diagnoses, treatments, notes and results for its own patients. ONC describes it as a digital version of the paper chart, used mainly for diagnosis and treatment within that practice."],["An ",{"href":"/glossary/ehr","text":"EHR"}," goes further and is built to share data across providers. Many vendors use the two words loosely, so it is worth asking what a given system can actually send and receive."]],"why":["Smaller practices, specialist clinics and vets often run an EMR rather than a large hospital EHR. Products for them may need to read from it, write to it or replace it, and each choice changes the build a lot."],"example":["A physiotherapy chain wants exercise plans to appear in its clinicians' charts. Its EMR offers a simple export and a limited API, not full ",{"href":"/glossary/fhir","text":"FHIR"},", so the integration pulls appointments and pushes a PDF summary to the chart."],"inBuild":["We start by listing what the customer's EMR can really do: API, file export, or nothing. That decides whether we integrate, sync on a schedule or build the record ourselves, and whether the product holds ",{"href":"/glossary/phi","text":"PHI"}," that needs HIPAA safeguards."],"mistakes":[["Using EMR and EHR as the same thing in a scope, then finding the system cannot share data."],["Planning a sync without agreeing which system is the source of truth for each field."],["Forgetting that patients' records must be exportable when a practice changes systems."]],"related":[{"href":"/glossary/ehr","label":"EHR (electronic health record)","detail":"A digital record of a patient's health and care that is built to be shared with other providers, so it can follow the patient."},{"href":"/glossary/fhir","label":"FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources)","detail":"A standard from HL7 for exchanging health data through modern web APIs, built from small, defined pieces called resources."},{"href":"/glossary/hl7","label":"HL7 (Health Level Seven)","detail":"The standards body behind major health data standards, and the common name for its Version 2 messages that hospital systems use to exchange data."},{"href":"/glossary/phi","label":"PHI (protected health information)","detail":"Health information that can identify a person and is created or held by a HIPAA covered entity or its business associate."},{"href":"/glossary/offline-first","label":"Offline-first","detail":"A way of building apps so they work fully without a network connection, saving changes on the device and syncing them when a connection returns."}],"tools":[{"href":"/tools/ehr-integration-cost","label":"EHR integration cost","detail":"Free tool"},{"href":"/tools/patient-portal-cost","label":"Patient portal cost","detail":"Free tool"},{"href":"/tools/hipaa-risk-assessment","label":"HIPAA risk assessment","detail":"Free tool"}],"links":[{"href":"/software/clinics","label":"Software for clinics","detail":"Clinic systems, the rules that apply and how they are built."},{"href":"/software/healthdata","label":"Health data software","detail":"Health records, integrations and data platforms."},{"href":"/software/vet","label":"Software for vets","detail":"Veterinary practice systems and apps."}],"sources":[{"title":"HealthIT.gov (ONC), EMR vs EHR: what is the difference?","url":"https://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/electronic-health-and-medical-records/emr-vs-ehr-difference","checkedAt":"2026-10-25"}],"legal":false,"updatedAt":"2026-10-25"}