An Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) is a collection of technologies that work together to provide a comprehensive solution for managing the creation, capture, indexing, storage, retrieval, and disposition of records and information assets of the organization.

EDM (Electronic Document Management) is the management of different kinds of documents in an enterprise using computer programs and storage. An EDM system allows an enterprise and its users to create a document or capture a hard copy in electronic form, store, edit, print, process, and otherwise manage documents in image, video, and audio, as well as in text form. An EDM system usually provides a single view of multiple databases and may include scanners for document capture, printers for creating hard copy, storage devices such as redundant array of independent disks systems, and computer server and server programs for managing the databases that contains the documents.

A document management system (DMS) is a system (based on computer programs in the case of the management of digital documents) used to track, manage and store documents and reduce paper. Most are capable of keeping a record of the various versions created and modified by different users (history tracking). The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to.

The increased portability and accessibility of electronic medical records may increase the ease with which they can be accessed and stolen by unauthorized persons or unscrupulous users versus paper medical records, as acknowledged by the increased security requirements for electronic medical records included in the Health Information and Accessibility Act and by large-scale breaches in confidential records reported by EMR users.Concerns about security contribute to the resistance shown to their widespread adoption.