EMR or EHR ! Which is vital in cancer treatment ?

Electronic medical records are the digital versions of paper records, or charts at a clinician's office. EMRs typically contain general information such as treatment and medical history about a patient as it is collected by the individual medical practice where as EHR is more comprehensive record of the patient's health. As cancer is known to have a high morbidity and mortality, its treatment results in a huge financial crisis for the families which includes including investigations, surgery and radiotherapy. Apart from the treating the patient, a clinician needs to possess a up to date record of the patient in order to treat with ease. EMR and EHR are handy and of paramount importance in such conditions. But, which of these stands on the top in cancer therapy?

Knowing a patient's anatomic and nonanatomic staging data is essential both for prognostication and for determining optimal therapy. EHRs ideally display key data for providers in a way that facilitates safe and effective care. Moreover, a clear and transparent documentation of cancer stage in the EHR early in the course of disease is a metric of quality cancer care. Again, is EHR the one stop solution? Cancer stage for instance is documented in cancer registries that are maintained by cancer registrars in most hospitals. Data suggest that the accuracy of cancer staging in registries is high. Cancer registrars are highly trained coding experts who spend considerable time and effort reviewing provider documentation as well as radiology and pathology reports. On the other hand, registries often do not include all the potentially relevant information that is available within the EHR, such as more extensive medical history, treatment data, and outcomes. So both EHR and registries have their pros and cons. Employment of natural language processing was found to be a successful method with some minimal negatives like not all the patients were compared against the cancer registry. Since cancer is a huge tree with numerous branches including treatment, stages etc. Also a few terms like metastasis was also point of confusion for clinicians. Some of the potential solutions to the accuracy and time limitations of busy clinicians would be to use cancer registry staff to input these data into the EHR.EHRs using a “structured narrative,” whereby NLP is performed at the time of free-text entry, leading to coding of data with immediate feedback to the documenter for verification, is also a way to more accurately and discretely capture structured data from unstructured notes. So, I believe EMR and EHR have their own advantages employed by clinical analysists and clinical research associates in cancer therapy helping clinicians. Hence the CRO's act as a bridge between patients and health care centers.