Medical transcription is the process of creating patient records by converting audio files dictated by the healthcare professional of the patient-healthcare professional encounter into text format. Medical transcription is an important ingredient of the healthcare process providing inputs for the operational as well as commercial aspects of healthcare.
However medical transcription is a specialized skill that requires the right blend of people skills & expertise, the right equipment and the optimum process to meet the criteria of being accurate, speedy, safe and easy to use.
One easy fix to ensure that patient records are accurately, speedily and safely created, while still containing costs is to outsource medical transcription to an experienced medical transcription service provider. By outsourcing medical transcription to a service provider, healthcare facilities can leverage on the medical transcription service provider’s experience and expertise.
How does outsourcing medical transcription help healthcare facilities leverage on the service provider’s experience and expertise?
To understand how outsourcing helps healthcare facilities leverage on the service provider’ experience and expertise, it is vital to understand what are the components of accurate, timely, safe and cost effective medical transcription.
People: The quality of medical transcription is dependent on the quality of medical transcriptionists to a large extent. Building up the right team would essentially involve the following activities:
1. Recruitment: Sourcing and recruiting the right talent
2. Training: Developing the talent to deliver the best quality work
3. Allocation of work: Work allocation to medical transcriptionists should be based on the specialties they have been trained on, to ensure optimum accuracy and turnaround time
By outsourcing medical transcription, healthcare facilities essentially have access to the right people without actually having to through the process of sourcing, recruiting, training medical transcriptionists. Healthcare facilities can leverage on the human resource development skills and expertise of the service provider.
Technology: Technology plays a vital role by speeding up the process, securing the data during the transcription process and saving time of the healthcare professionals and support staff. The role of technology in medical transcription includes:
1. Dictation: Capturing the narration of the healthcare professionals by various means
3. Downloading: Downloading finished transcripts
4. Distribution: Distribution of patient records to healthcare professionals
5. Archives: Retrieving old files from the system
6. Additional benefits: Features like electronic signature, remote printing & faxing, HL7 interface etc
7. Security: Features like encryption, virus protection, firewalls etc
8. Speed: To ensure fast turnaround time
Outsourcing medical transcription services allows healthcare facilities to leverage on the software and tools developed by the service provider to avail benefits like speed, safety and ease of use.
Processes: Medical transcription needs to follow a certain process to be quick, accurate, safe and cost effective. The processes involved in medical transcription include:
1. Quality processes: To attain the desired accuracy levels transcripts have to be checked at several levels like proofreader, editor and quality assurance team.
2. Security: To protect confidential patient information, the service provider has to have processes in place to ensure total security.
Outsourcing medical transcription enables healthcare facilities to benefit from the processes refined by the service provider through their experience in serving the needs of healthcare facilities
Infrastructure: Medical transcription requires infrastructure like:
1. Real estate: Space allocated for medical transcription
2. Transcription equipment: Computers, servers, foot pedals, headphones and software are required for transcription.
3. Furniture & utilities: Tables, chairs and utilities like power etc.
Outsourcing medical transcription allows healthcare facilities to avoid investment in non-medical transcription related infrastructure.
It can be concluded that by outsourcing medical transcription, healthcare facilities can leverage on the expertise and experience of the service provider. This helps healthcare facilities in limiting the cost of medical transcription to the cost per line of transcription. Not only this they would also save as much as 40% to 60% on the cost of in-house transcription. To leverage the maximum benefits of outsourcing medical transcription it is important to source the right medical transcription service provider, based on criteria like accuracy, turnaround time, security, cost and technology.
TransDyne offers quality medical transcription at reasonable prices, done by expert 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!
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