Medical transcription has been a part of healthcare from the very beginning, faithfully creating patient records from the details provided by the healthcare professionals of their encounter with patients. Though transcription has been around almost as long as healthcare services, it has evolved a long way from the original primitive version of hand written notes to the current version of creating patient records on the computer.
It is recognized that creating patient medical records is a specialized skill requiring the right combination of team, technology and process and it has been acknowledged that the efficient, effective and economic fix to create patient records is to outsource the entire process. Outsourced services have the advantage of providing enterprising solutions to the changing needs of healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals.
How does outsourcing provide enterprising solutions for the documentation needs of healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities?
Transcription vendors have always strived to provide services that meet the changing needs of healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities by taking initiative, using imagination and undertaking to customize technology to provide safe, accurate, speedy and cost effective services.
To understand how outsourcing provides enterprising services it is important to study how this service has evolved to meet the challenges/ needs of the healthcare sector.
Given below are some of the milestones that this services has achieved:
- Providing remote medical transcription services: The process of creating medical records has evolved from a service requiring the physical presence of the transcriptionist to a service, which can be availed from remote locations. Vendors have used the Internet enterprisingly to help healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities avail the best quality service without having to incur any overheads. This ensures that the healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals can avail the requisite services having to pay only for the quantity used. Factors like overtime pay, wastage during slack times, arrangements for weekend & holiday transcription are all covered by the service provider without compromising accuracy, turnaround time and security
- Making provisions for flexible modes of dictation: Outsourced medical transcription service providers have ensured that healthcare professionals can capture the details of the patient-healthcare professional encounter without having to change their style of dictation or having to waste time by allowing them to use familiar and flexible methods of dictation. Transcription vendors have enterprisingly used technology to help healthcare professionals in optimizing their limited time resources
- Aiding adoption of EMR/EHR: Investment in EMR/EHR systems requires a huge capital outlay. HL7 interface has enterprisingly been provided to enable adoption of EMR/EHR systems
- Editing services for Speech recognition transcription: Some healthcare professionals have invested in voice recognition/speech recognition software. Though this software has the ability to convert speech to text, the accuracy levels have been found to be unacceptable. Editing and quality control services have been enterprisingly provided for such transcripts.
- Specialty medical transcription: Healthcare is a vast field having many specialties. Transcriptionists working on the process of creating records for specialties need to be familiar with the language of the specialty to provide services of the required accuracy and turnaround time. Solutions have enterprisingly provided for specialty transcription by training transcriptionists to be domain experts in one or two specialties ensuring quality work from the very beginning
- Archives: One of the requirements of healthcare facilities, especially those generating substantial quantities of transcription work, is to be able to keep tabs on the audio files, work-in-progress and finished transcripts. They also need a system through which can trace patient files easily. Archives have been enterprisingly provided to enable all these functions
- Choices for document delivery: All patient records are vital to the healthcare process, but some require more priority than others. It is important for the medical transcription service provider to have various means to deliver the document to the healthcare professionals in a secure and quick manner. Multiple modes of document delivery have bee provided to facilitate this.