Thursday, June 11, 2009

Alphabet Soup

There are many commonly used abbreviations in discussing Health IT. I thought it might be helpful to list some here:

AHIC American Health Information Community

AHIMA
American Health Information Management Association

AHRQ
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

ANSI
American National Standards Institute

CCHIT
Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology

CDS
Clinical Decision Support

CHC
Community Health Centers

CMS
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

CONNECT
NHIN gateway

CPOE
Computerized Physician Order Entry

EHR
Electronic Health Record

EMR
Electronic Medical Record

FHA
Federal Health Architecture

HHS
Department of Health & Human Services

HIE
Health Information Exchange

HIMSS
Healthcare Information Management Systems Society

HIPAA
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

HIT
Health Information Technology

HITSP
Health Information Technology Standards Panel

HL7
Health Level 7

HRSA
Health Resources and Services Administration

ICD
International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems

JCAHO
Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations

NCVHS
National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics

NHIN
Nationwide Health Information Network

NIH
National Institutes of Health

NLM
National Library of Medicine

ONC
Office of the National Coordinator (usual abbreviation for ONCHIT)

ONCHIT
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

PHR
Personal Health Record

PQRI
Physican Quality Reporting Initiative

RHIO
Regional Health Information Network

SLHIE
State Level Health Information Exchange Consensus Project

SNOMED
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine

VHA
Veterans Health Administration

VistA
Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture

I particularly would like to point out the differences between EMR, EHR and PHR. These terms tend to be used interchangeably, but they actually refer to different things. In fact the definition of EHR depends a lot on what the definiton of "meaningful use" is. You could define an EMR as just the physician interface and EHR including both a physician and patient interface (with some interoperability between systems). PHR is still an ill-defined concept that has been slowly developing over many years. Certainly PHR is a computerized application that stores an individual's personal health information. The key difference being that a PHR is typically a health record that is created, controlled and maintained by an individual patient, while the EMR is created, controlled and maintained by the provider. Hopefully one day we will have an intersection at truly meaningful EHR.