How is Rcopia different from an EMR system?

How is Rcopia different from an EMR system?

This was a question that a friend asked me recently. This is probably the most common question that comes to our mind when we glance at a patient record in a electronic prescription application like Rcopia and a EMR system. The following are details that are found in both systems,

• Patient Demographics
• Medical History
• Medication
• Current problem

An Electronic Medical Record (EMR) application is typically a computerized medical record of a patient that is created in an EMR system. The following are some of the details that are stored in a EMR system,

•  Patient demographics
• Medical History
• Medication
• Current Problem
• SOAP Notes
• Medical Records
• E-prescription

• Practice Management functionalities like appointment scheduling, billing and coding, are also available in some EMR systems

E-prescription or electronic prescription is the electronic generation of prescriptions using a e-prescription software and delivering the same to a pharmacy through a transmission network like Surescripts, Rxhub and Proxymed

Both the systems are also capable of doing the following apart from the common functionalities,

•  Generate alerts about drug interaction, drug allergy
• Integrate with other information systems using HL7
•  Export patient medical record in ASTM CCR or HL7 CCD format

An EMR application can also support the following,

1. Integrate with medical devices X-Ray, Scanning machines, ECG, etc and fetch the data directly from these devices. The medical reports from devices are stored, and managed using DICOM standards. DICOM enables the integration of medical devices, servers, workstations, printers, and network hardware from multiple manufacturers into a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS)
2. Order laboratory tests and receive results. LOINC is used for transmitting laboratory and clinical observations in HL7 messages

The e-prescribing functionality is available either by integrating the EMR system with a 3^rd party e-prescription solution or through an inbuilt e-prescription module.  Thus an e-prescription application can be visualized as a subset of an EMR application.