Medical transcription outsourcing: Providing secure solutions

The relationship between the patient and the healthcare professional is considered sacrosanct; this is essential because availing healthcare requires the patient to reveal personal details to the healthcare professional to obtain the correct treatment to his/her ailments, assuming that this information would be kept confidential. Therefore one of the concerns for healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities is to maintain the confidentiality of patient information. This is not only necessary but also mandatory under the law.

HIPAA (Health Information Portability and accessibility Act) has provisions for protection of confidential patient information. There have been additional safeguards added to HIPAA with the provisions under the HITECH Act. The HITECH act empowers HIPAA making it more stringent, helping protect confidential patient information.

However the process of healthcare is the culmination of inputs from various sources to be effective. It becomes important to protect patient information at every level in the healthcare process. One such contributor to the process of healthcare is medical transcription, by creating patient records. And outsourcing medical transcription has proven to be one of the most efficient, effective and economic ways to create patient records.

However while outsourcing medical transcription one of the main concerns is protection of confidential patient information. The process of medical transcription involves several steps and confidential data needs to be protected at each stage by the medical transcription service provider during this process.

What are the steps involved in the medical transcription process?

• Collection of dictation from healthcare professionals
• Transmission of audio files to the medical transcription service provider
• Distribution of audio files for transcription
• The actual transcription process
• Transmission of finished transcripts to the healthcare facility to be distributed to the relevant healthcare professionals

At each step of the process the data is vulnerable to misuse. While outsourcing medical transcription it is important that the security measures taken by the medical transcription service provider at every level should be assessed to ensure that the data is protected. The security measures taken by the medical transcription service provider should not only extend to the technology but also cover the people involved in the transcription process and the process and premises used for medical transcription.

TransDyne, a leader in the outsourced medical transcription industry is aware of the importance of providing medical transcription services with total security. The steps taken by TransDyne to be HIPAA/HITECH compliant include:

1st stage: Collection of dictation

• Firewall protected server that stores all dictation files
• Communication between the healthcare facility server and TransDyne server is encrypted
• Virus protection is also provided
• The access to this data requires password authentication

2nd stage: Transmission of audio files to TransDyne

• 128 bit encryption
• Secure socket layer connections

3rd stage: Distribution of audio files for transcription

• All medical transcription related software is designed and created in house
• Limited access, access is limited to only one dictation at a time
• Multi tiered application architecture ensuring that even if there is unauthorized access to network, access to databases is only possible after authentication at several levels
• Denial of access and multi modal alerts, this ensures that any unauthorized access triggers of a warning immediately
• Limited Email access ensuring that there is no misuse of patient data

4th stage: The actual transcription process: At this stage of medical transcription, TransDyne has provided for the safety of patient data, by securing people, processes and infrastructure along with protecting technology

• No subcontractors are used, all work outsourced to TransDyne is executed in-house
• Medical transcription in company owned premises
• Manned security and surveillance
• No removable media
• Educating medical transcriptionists on the importance of HIPAA/HITECH compliance
• Background checking for employees
• Security routines
• Joint access
• Regular security audits

5th stage: Transmission of finished transcripts to the healthcare facility. This stage involves the same procedure and technology as the 1st and 2nd stage.

Not only does TransDyne provide secure medical transcription solutions, TransDyne also offers quality medical transcription at reasonable prices, done by expert medical transcriptionists with a very quick turnaround time, with very high levels of accuracy and all this with technology that is advanced but easy to use!

To avail secure outsourced medical transcription solutions from TransDyne, click here.