EMR vs PIMS
An EMR is the medical record itself. A PIMS is the whole practice system that wraps the medical record together with scheduling, billing, inventory, and communication.
These terms get mixed up. An EMR, or electronic medical record, is the clinical record for a patient: history, exams, labs, prescriptions, and vaccines. A PIMS, or practice information management system, is the larger system that includes the EMR plus everything else a practice needs to operate.
Put simply, the EMR is one part of the PIMS. When a vendor sells a veterinary EMR, it is usually a full PIMS with the medical record at its center.
What matters most is whether you can get your records out. A medical record is only truly yours if you can export it in a format you can read. OpenVPM keeps a public schema and full export, so your EMR data is portable by design.
See how OpenVPM does it
OpenVPM is the open-source veterinary PIMS. Free to self-host, with an open API and your data always exportable. The demo is live, no signup.