Thursday, August 4, 2011

Medical transcription outsourcing: Services with a holistic viewpoint

The aim of healthcare services is first and foremost the well being of the consumer that is the patient. All the services and products associated with the process of providing healthcare need to understand this underlying goal and set quality parameters accordingly. Taking on a holistic approach has become even more relevant in the current scenario, given the proposed changes to the healthcare system and the need for an electronic healthcare system.

With the introduction of the ARRA and the HITECH, the healthcare documentation scenario has been facing tumultuous times.  Medical transcription services have been a long-standing contributor to the healthcare documentation process, being the process of converting the dictation of the healthcare professional regarding the patient encounter into text format. Due to the labor intensive and time consuming nature of medical transcription it benefits from being outsourced.

Owing to their vast experience and their expertise in meeting the changing needs of the healthcare sector, outsourced medical transcription companies are able to provide services with a holistic viewpoint. Services with a holistic viewpoint can be defined as services that are aligned with the needs of the most important stakeholder in the healthcare process – the patient.

The salient points of medical transcription services with a holistic viewpoint are:

Ensuring quality of information: Accuracy of information in the patient medical record is probably one of the basic and most important requirements, as accurate information is essential for providing care and in the process of clinical decision-making. Outsourcing medical transcription to a professional medical transcription company ensures that the accuracy of the information in the patient medical record is high. Medical transcription companies ensure this using a holistic approach. Some of the steps taken by medical transcription companies to ensure quality are:

·        Encouraging the use of good quality dictation devices
·        Providing guidelines for dictation to healthcare professionals
·        Providing constructive feedback on the quality of dictation to improve the quality of audio
·        Training medical transcriptionists on all the nuances of medical transcription skills
·        Putting each transcript through stringent quality processes
·        Providing constant training and other resources to medical transcriptionists to encourage quality transcription

Cost effective and efficient services: Healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals are constantly faced with the necessity to curb indirect costs to enable them to provide good quality services at reasonable rates. Though medical transcription is one aspect of the expenses, outsourcing medical transcription enables healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals to save on cost of medical transcription by more than 40%, which has an impact on decreasing overall costs and improving efficiency.

Providing value by preserving the narrative: Medical transcription services add value to the documentation process in several aspects, including:

·        Helping preserve the narrative portion of the patient medical record, which is invaluable to the diagnostic process
·        Helps the healthcare professional focus on the patient rather than on documentation
·        Helps improve the productivity of healthcare professionals and support staff

Services that enhance healthcare professional efficiency from start to finish: Another aspect of outsourced medical transcription services is the technology used by them. The software and tools used by the transcription company provides multiple benefits while still remaining easy to use. The technology used by the service provider has an impact on various aspects that help improve the efficiency of the healthcare professionals including:

·        Medical transcription companies allow healthcare professionals to retain dictation modes of their choice. This helps healthcare professionals manage their time better thus improving efficiency
·        Automatic upload of dictation for transcription
·        Multiple document delivery modes
·        Easy tracking of transcription

Prompt services: One of the important aspects of outsourcing medical transcription is that of timely transcription. Timely transcription has a positive impact on the care process, the coding and billing process. Both these aspects affect the care provided to patients

Innovating services to meet changing needs: Medical transcription services are constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities. These include HL7 interface for EMR/ EHR adoption and providing editing & proofreading services for speech recognition software transcription.

It can be concluded that medical transcription companies provide services with a holistic viewpoint using the right team, the right technology and the right processes.

TransDyne, a leader in the outsourced medical transcription industry has used their extensive background in information technology and their experience in serving the needs of the healthcare sector to provide affordable and integrated medical transcription solutions.

TransDyne offers quality medical transcription at reasonable prices, executed by experienced and qualified medical transcriptionists with a very quick turnaround time executed through secure HIPAA and HITECH compliant channels, with very high levels of accuracy and all this with technology that is advanced but easy to use!               

To avail complete medical transcription services from TransDyne, click here.

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