Electronic Medical Record

EMR

operations

Updated 5/16/2026

Definition

Digital clinical record maintained within a single provider organization or practice, capturing patient diagnoses, treatments, and encounter history. Unlike EHRs, EMRs are not designed for cross-organization sharing and serve as the internal source of truth for facility-specific clinical data pipelines.

Standard Abbreviation

EMR

Database Usage

-- Example column naming
CREATE TABLE claims (
  clm_id VARCHAR(50),
  emr VARCHAR(100),  -- Electronic Medical Record (max 100 chars)
  ...
);

-- Example in SELECT
SELECT
  clm_id,
  emr as electronic_medical_record
FROM claims;

Common uses in healthcare data

Healthcare data warehouse schema design and modeling
Interoperability and cross-system data exchange
ETL pipeline development and orchestration
Master data management (MDM) programs
Analytics and business intelligence reporting

Example database column name

ISO-11179 snake_case standard

-- Recommended column name
emr

-- Example DDL
CREATE TABLE healthcare_data (
  record_id   VARCHAR(50)   NOT NULL,
  emr          VARCHAR(100),  -- Electronic Medical Record (max 100 chars)
  created_dt  TIMESTAMP     NOT NULL DEFAULT NOW()
);

Column names follow the ISO-11179 naming convention: lowercase, underscore-separated, using the standard abbreviation as a prefix where applicable.

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