An electronic health record (EHR) is the digital record of a patient's health that a clinic or hospital keeps: diagnoses, medicines, allergies, test results and doctors' notes. It is also called an electronic medical record (EMR). Every visit adds to it. It is also the system that the clinic runs on: the doctor writes in it, the nurse follows the orders in it, and the bill is produced from it. So the EHR is a system of record, the one database that everyone treats as the official version.
Different kinds of care need different records. A clinic runs on an ambulatory EHR, built for short visits. A whole hospital runs on a hospital EHR, which also covers the wards, the operating theatres and the emergency room. Mental-health, addiction and home-care services use a behavioural health EHR, which holds many notes from many carers over months.
Most EHR companies in this zone sell to clinics and hospitals in the United States, and build much of their software in India. In India, hospitals use records of their own, often called a hospital information system (HIS). Under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, these records can be linked to a patient's ABHA number, with the patient's consent. Sharing records between systems in a common format is called interoperability.
The record turned doctors into typists. Studies find that doctors spend about as much time in the record as with their patients. Two products in this zone reduce that work. An AI medical scribe listens to the visit and drafts the doctor's note. It also suggests the medical codes from which the bill is made. And clinical decision support answers the doctor's questions about a disease or a medicine while the doctor decides the treatment.