Saturday, December 8, 2012

Medical transcription outsourcing: Avail professional services

Medical transcription plays an important role in the healthcare process by creating accurate, secure, timely and cost-effective records. Outsourcing medical transcription is one of the most effective ways to ensure that the healthcare facility gets maximum advantages with minimum cost.  But outsourcing an essential service like medical transcription requires the healthcare facility to undertake a detailed analysis, assessment and selection process.

While outsourcing it is important to assess whether the medical transcription service provider has professional standards of medical transcription.

What is meant by professional medical transcription?

To define the standards of professional medical transcription, it is important to define the word “ professional” and see how the standards of professionalism apply to medical transcription services.

 The word “professional” can be defined as:

  • Member of a vocation having specialized vocational training: In case of a medical transcription service provider this can be attributed to: 
a)    Software and tools developed by the service provider to ease the process of transcription
b)    Developing training programs to sharpen skills of the medical transcriptionists team
c)     Ability to create tailor made solutions to aid the needs of the healthcare facilities

  • Person/organization having competence in a particular activity: In case of medical transcription this can be attributed to the competence of medical transcriptionists in being trained to be domain experts in one or two specialties.
  • Qualified: This refers to the experience of the medical transcription service provider in serving the needs of their customers successfully by providing tailor-made solutions, in a cost-effective manner. This means providing medical transcription services while maintaining standards of accuracy, turnaround time, security and low costs.
  • Having expert and specialized knowledge: This refers to the technological capability of the medical transcription service provider in applying technology to optimize the time of the healthcare professionals, while making technology easy to use.
  • Ability to produce quality work: This refers to the standards and procedures established by the medical transcription service provider to provide accurate transcription.
  • Having high professional ethics: In the context of a medical transcription service provider this refers to maintaining security of confidential patient information.
  • Having reasonable work moral and motivation: This refers to the commitment of the medical transcription service provider to meet turnaround time guarantees. 
To assess the professional capabilities of the medical transcription service provider, the service provider needs to be evaluated on the following criteria:

  • Accuracy: This means the percentage of accuracy of the completed transcripts vis-à-vis what was dictated. A minimum of 99% and above would be acceptable.

  • Turnaround time: Turnaround time refers to the time taken to revert the transcribed report to the healthcare facility. A Turnaround time of not more than 24 hours for normal reports and 4-12 hours for STAT reports would be considered ideal.

  • Data security: The service provider being outsourced to should be HIPAA and HITECH compliant. The medical transcription service provider has to have adequate security measures to ensure that the confidential data transmitted back and forth is safe and secure.

  • Pricing: Reduced cost is one of the main benefits that a healthcare facility hopes to have, from the outsourcing option. Pricing should be fair and reasonable for the services rendered. Pricing method should also be transparent and simple so that both parties can verify the same at any stage of the process

  • Technology: The technology used by the medical transcription company should not only be secure but should also be easy to use, without having to require extensive training. 
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!         

For more details about the advantages of outsourcing to a professional medical transcription service provider like TransDyne, click here.

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