Talk:Electronic health record

That may be a MeSH definition, but it's wrong.

Call it an EHR, EMR, PHR, or whatever, there is a massive difference between the machine-processable data that constitutes the record, and the human and automated medical equipment interfaces to it. In my practice of medical informatics, I often illuminate people who ask "how do I justify an EMR?" and I say "you don't."

If I dumped out an actual electronic medical record, it might be a collection of XML representation of HL7, which, on its own, is as comprehensible to most physicians as, alas, handwritten prescriptions. Now, if I present a history-taking tool, a set of workflow screens and schedules, a clinical decision support tool operating on the EMR and its knowledge base, I have something I can justify. When portions of the EMR need to be sent, in machine-readable form, to a third-party payor's computers, there is a justification.

We need to separate the presentation and use of the information in the record from the mechanisms of the record itself. Those mechanisms are nontrivial and important, since a major part of health cost is information transfer. Incompatible EHR formats require expensive manual intervention.

Howard C. Berkowitz 15:27, 9 October 2008 (CDT)

Security & privacy

Ross Anderson at Cambridge has done extensive work [1] on security & privacy of clinical information systems, some of it as a consultant to the British Medical Association. Some of this needs discussion here. Sandy Harris 13:43, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

External links

Why does this article have an "external links" section in the text, rather than using the external links subpage? That is certainly contrary to the usual CZ practice. I'm not certain if it violates any policy. Sandy Harris 16:06, 11 July 2011 (UTC)