EHR vs. EMR what is the difference?

The recent mandates to move to electronic records has brought to light many new buzz words, some hard to say let alone spell.  Behavioral health and addiction treatment industries have been slow to embrace the installation of an electronic chart such as our TIER Workflow System.  Now all of a sudden there are Executive Orders for electronic records, state mandates to automate and payors dictating electronic claims only will be reimbursed.  This sudden influx of attention, stress and pressure has yielded many new terms that have been thankfully defined.

I am in the healthcare software business and I often have used terms interchangeably as well as had to visit a web dictionary or reference document to actually follow some of my own rhetoric.  I found The National Alliance for Health Information Technology Report to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on Defining Key Health Information Technology Terms extremely helpful and would suggest a review of their definitions for such key terms as Electronic Medical Record, Electronic Health Record, Personal Health Record and Interoperability.