lundi 25 janvier 2010

Pubmed Search of EMR, EHR and PHR terms

After reading a post of my friend Denise Silber on its dynamic and visionary blog relating to what terminology is used when talking about computerized/electronic medical/health records and because of my scienfic biomedical educatin, I searched on pubmed database when these terms have appeared for the first time in publications indexed by the National Library of Medicine.

It is important to note that searches are case insensitive in pubmed and that the searched was made on january 25th, 2010 as the database is regularly completed with new articles and in some cases ancient ones. Indeed, the number of articles retrieved and given in this post might slightly differ from your own queries.



 You will find here a graphical representation of the searches where the size of the bubbles represents the number of articles retrieved. I only represented the searches with the term "record" in its singular form assuming that it will be more associated to the concept and theory than the experimentation linked to these terms. Indeed, all terms with the plural forms yielded articles that were not older than the ones with the singular form of the word "record".







 


1. "Personal Health Record" : 1973 (111 articles)
When using the word record at the plural form,  the oldest reference is 1987 (176 articles) . At this stage, without having access at the oldest full text or resume, it is highly probable that it relates to a non electronic version.
No articles were retrieved with the phrase "Electronic personal record" nor with "computerized health record"

2. "Electronic Health Record" : 1993 (727 articles retrieved)

In that case, the use of the word records at the plural form leaded to the same result in terms of oldest articles but was associated to more articles (776 vs 727) 

3. "Electronic Medical Record" : 1962 (1396 articles retrieved)
Interestingly, when using the plural form for the word record (1268 articles), the oldest article retrieved was published in 1987 !

4. "Computerized Medical Record" : 1969 (195 articles retrieved)
Interestingly, when using the plural form for the word record, the oldest article retrieved was published in 1971 (292 articles retrieved) !

5. "E-Health" : 2000 (689 articles retrieved)
A total of 19 articles more ancient were retrieved in this list. However, a closer look at the resum revealed that indexation is impaired when using non alphabetical letters. Articles that were retrieved contained ".... i.e. health ..." or  in a bullet list paragrah " .... (e) health ...."

6. "M-Health" : 2004 (490 articles retrieved)
Like above for E-Heath the number of non specific articles articles retrieved is high due to the use of non alphabetical letters (the hyphen). However, analyzing the title and resumes of the oldest ones, it was possible to track back the ones directly linked to mobile health. The concept of mobility was not associated to phone but more to wide area networks.