electronic health record

noun

plural electronic health records

: a digital collection of a patient's medical information (such as medications, immunizations, lab results, or diagnoses) : EHR

Electronic health records have become essential tools in medicine, replacing the rooms full of paper documents that were hard to maintain and subject to fires and other losses.

—Karen Weintraub

For our staff and providers, having one electronic health record means one login and one point of access for all patient information. For patients, it means having one portal for all medical records …

—John Wilcox, quoted in Morris (Illinois) Daily Herald

Examples of electronic health record in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Closing the data gap Our study is not the first to point out how inconsistently menopause status and symptoms are recorded in healthcare settings and electronic health records. — Audrey Hendricks, The Conversation, 28 Sep. 2026

Healthcare organizations already have the systems (electronic health records; admission, discharge and transfer feeds; and so on), but the data is sitting in reports and dashboards instead of driving real-time decisions. — Expert Panel®, Forbes.com, 25 Sep. 2026

Even after all that, this whole journey more often than not doesn’t even make it into official electronic health records. — Helen Carefoot, Flow Space, 23 Sep. 2026

Study authors completed the study by gathering data from electronic health records and compared how patients fared on the lowest doses of the two medications. — Ken Alltucker, USA Today, 2 Sep. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1993, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for electronic health record

• abhorred
• aboard
• accord
• adored
• afford
• award
• baseboard
• billboard
• blackboard
• boxboard
• breadboard
• broadsword

Medical Definition

electronic health record

noun

: a digital collection of a patient's medical information (such as medications, immunizations, lab results, or diagnoses) : ehr

One of the key benefits of electronic health records is their ability to support coordinated care. They facilitate seamless data exchange between various providers, from primary care physicians to specialists …

—International Organization for Standardization

The traditional goal of progress notes is to provide a concise, up-to-date reflection of the patient's condition and the clinician's thought process. Electronic health records … allow physicians writing these notes to supplement traditional manual data entry with copied or imported text.

—Michael D. Wang et al., JAMA Internal Medicine