Healthcare IT Alphabet Soup — Descrambled!

Posted 29 June, 2007 in education

If you’ve been on the digital side of healthcare long, you’ve no doubt been inundated with a flood of domain-specific acronyms. If you’re new to the area, you’ll perhaps benefit from a catalog of some of the terms more frequently thrown about. I’ll add more to this list as time permits.

EMR (Electronic Medical Record): a medical record in digital format. If you’re still using paper records in your hospital, you need to change. now. seriously. NOW.
EHR (Electronic Health Record): a health record in digital format. (Though there might be technical differences for some, but the words EHR and EMR are used interchangeably by many.)
HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act): provides national healthcare privacy standards. It’s another reason why outsouring your EMR system is a good idea.
PHR (Personal Health Record): a health record maintained by an individual. All good EMR systems include a patient portal which allows patients to access their PHRs.
PI (Predictive Informatics): healthcare predictive analytics. When data mining is applied to healthcare data, useful trends can be found to modify outcomes.
HL7 (Health Level Seven): A way of encoding medical data so it can be transmitted between different systems without losing meaning. Particularly for large hospitals, interoperability between disparate systems is a must, so a common interchange format is required.
ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases): a classification system for diseases, symptoms, complaints, etc, used to correctly document a medical encounter and for insurance billing purposes. “Every health condition can be assigned to a unique category and given a code, up to six characters long.”
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine): a standard for storing medical imaging data. Another aspect of a full-fledged EMR system is the ability to view, annotate and manipulate DICOM images.

1 comment to “Healthcare IT Alphabet Soup — Descrambled!”

healthTech.accordingtome.com » Back to School (health records for kids), August 1st, 2007 at 11:41 am:

[…] the up side, USIIS does have a web interface and an HL7 interface and USIIS can be configured to work with EHR systems. As well, it has the ability to connect to […]