Medical transcription outsourcing: Creating meaningful documentation

Healthcare documentation has become a much discussed subject post the proposed move to an electronic healthcare system. As the core of this reform is to make healthcare more accessible and cost effective, healthcare facilities, healthcare professionals and the healthcare documentation sector is striving towards this goal. Traditionally medical transcription has been the process of documenting the process of healthcare by transcribing the narration of the patient- healthcare professional encounter into text format.

With the move towards an electronic healthcare system, healthcare professionals are being offered other methods of capturing information regarding the patient encounter. These include options like point and click entry by the healthcare professional at the point of care, front end speech recognition software etc. Each of these methods of documenting the care process has its own merits, however these methods have some disadvantages like hindering the care process, affecting the healthcare professionals’ productivity and failing to capture the entire patient story.

All these factors affect the various the purposes this information is used for – clinical decision-making, receivables management and risk management. Outsourcing medical transcription to a professional medical transcription company has proven to be a method of documenting the care process, which helps create meaningful documentation.

Given below are some of the areas that outsourced medical transcription services aid in creating meaningful documentation:

Creating patient medical records based on useful standards: The transcripts created by outsourced medical transcription companies meet usability standards like:

• Capturing the narrative to enable clinical decision making
• Detailed records supporting proper coding and billing for better receivables management
• Proper documentation support for risk management.

Ease of use for healthcare professionals: Outsourced medical transcription service providers provide services that are easy to use not only for healthcare professionals but also the other support staff involved in the care processes and other aspects. This include easy and user friendly methods of capturing dictation, automatic transmission for transcription, delivery of transcripts within specified turnaround time through preferred modes, interactive systems to keep track of medical transcription progress, access to older transcripts and HL7 interaction for adoption of EMR/EHR.

Reducing costs: Outsourcing medical transcription helps healthcare facilities clamp down on cost of transcription. This includes not only the actual cost of transcription but also all the other indirect cost of medical transcription, which are incurred when medical transcription is executed in-house.

Professional and technologically savvy medical transcription service providers have a large role to play in the move towards electronic healthcare systems by lending their experience and expertise in having successfully served the needs of healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities. This puts them in an unique position of having an innate knowledge of the operations of healthcare facilities and the work life of healthcare professionals. It enables them to use this knowledge to create solutions that help create meaningful documentation.

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.

Medical transcription outsourcing: A sustainable model for creating patient medical records

A commonly acknowledged fact about the healthcare sector is that it is a complex service involving a series of healthcare related and other factors that enable the delivery of quality healthcare on a timely basis. Therefore most healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals focus on lessening the burden of factors other than the actual process of healthcare on healthcare professionals and support staff.  Creating patient medical records is one such function. It is essential for not only timely and efficient delivery of care, but also for other aspects like receivables management, risk management and meeting statutory obligations but is not part of the core functions.

Healthcare professionals and other support staff have various options for creating patient medical records, but over time medical transcription has proven to be one of the most efficient methods of documenting the care process. Moreover medical transcription is one such function that lends itself to being outsourced. Outsourcing medical transcription to a professional medical transcription company has many advantages one of the main being the sustainability of this model.

How do outsourcing transcription services provide sustainable support to healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals?

To understand how medical transcription services provide a sustainable model for creating patient medical records it is important to understand the main components of quality medical transcription. Quality medical transcription is defined as accurate, timely, secure and cost effective transcription. The main requirements for quality medical transcription are:

• Team
• Technology
• Processes

By outsourcing medical transcription to a professional medical transcription company, the onus of all these three resources is shifted to the medical transcription service provider, lessening the burden of healthcare facilities. However the process of choosing the right medical transcription service provider needs to be based on the right criteria to ensure seamless services.

Given below are the criteria on which the medical transcription company needs to be evaluated:

Team

• Sourcing: It is important to assess the service provider on the basis of their policy for sourcing and hiring the right talent. This needs to be continuous process to ensure that there is no dearth of medical transcriptionists to meet the changing needs of healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals.

• Developing: Once the right talent has been sourced it is important to provide these medical transcriptionists with the right training to ensure accurate and timely transcription. Considering that medicine is a vast subject with various specialties, it is important to train medical transcriptionists on different specialties based on their acumen to make them domain experts.

• Work allocation and continuous education: Apart from sourcing and developing the right talent it is important to allocate medical transcription work based on the specialty of medical transcriptionist team. It is also important to provide resources for medical transcriptionists to keep their knowledge updated.

Technology

• Maximum benefits: Considering the hectic work schedules of healthcare professionals it is important for medical transcription companies to use technology that provides maximum benefits. This should have options for collection of audio files as well as options for delivery of transcripts

• Easy to use: It is equally important for medical transcription companies to keep the technology as easy to use as possible to ease the burden on healthcare professionals and other support staff.

• Secure: Another aspect of the right technology includes providing security during the entire process of transcription

• Updated: Keeping in consideration the changing healthcare documentation scenario, medical transcription companies should constantly update technology and services to include the latest developments like HL7 interface, proofreading and editing services for speech recognition software transcription

Processes

• For quality: It is important to assess whether the medical transcription company subjects transcripts to multiple level quality checks to minimize errors
• For security: As protecting the confidentiality of patient information is both a legal and ethical responsibility it is important to source a medical transcription company who has processes in place to ensure HIPAA and HITECH compliance.

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.

Medical transcription outsourcing: Helping improve performance metrics

The pressures on the healthcare industry are endless, having to meet the needs of all the participants, stakeholders and various regulatory authorities. The operations of healthcare facilities are further complicated by limited resources and the numerous demands made on these resources. It becomes important for healthcare facilities to prioritize their core activities and outsource those activities that are not core activities. This will not only reduce the strain on their resources but also allow healthcare facilities to avail specialist services that help improve their performance metrics.

Medical transcription is one such activity that provides support to healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities by creating accurate, timely, secure and cost effective patient medical records. Not only that outsourcing medical transcription also helps healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals improve their performance metrics.

How does outsourcing medical transcription help improve performance metrics?

Outsourcing medical transcription helps strengthen the operations of healthcare facilities in areas like clinical decision making, risk management and receivable management, which in turn help improve some of the criteria used for measuring performance metrics.

The criteria used for measuring performance metrics are:

• Time: Outsourcing medical transcription helps the creation of patient medical records within short turnaround time. Outsourced medical transcription companies also use software and technology that help ease and speed up the process of collecting dictation and delivery of transcripts thus help in effective management of time

• Cost: Outsourcing medical transcription results in substantial reduction of transcription costs. And timely medical transcription also helps in better receivable management by helping quicken the process.

• Resources: Outsourcing medical transcription not only reduces the actual cost of medical transcription but also results in better resources utilization like real estate, computers, other equipment and management personnel which would have been used for in-house medical transcription.

• Scope: Outsourcing medical transcription also ensures that the medical transcription company provides services that cover the entire scope of transcription services, taking care of various specialties, dictation modes, document delivery modes, HL7 interface and even editing and proofreading services for speech recognition software transcription.

• Quality: By maintaining the quality of information captured in patient medical records, outsourced medical transcription services provide important support to improving the quality of care.

• Actions: Outsourcing medical transcription also ensures a smoother flow of information by providing easy to access archives facility. This ensures that the action of the doctors/support staff/clinics/hospitals is directed towards the betterment of the quality of healthcare services.

It can be concluded that choosing the right medical transcription company, which can provide complete support in terms of people, processes and technology can help improve the performance metrics of the healthcare facility.

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.

Medical transcription outsourcing: Forming the base for quality healthcare

Healthcare and medical transcription services have had a long-term association, with transcription providing vital documentation support to healthcare in an accurate, timely, secure and cost effective manner. Due to a long term association with the healthcare sector medical transcription has become a specialized service using quality personnel, stringent processes and advanced technology to provide services that help in various aspects of successfully running healthcare facilities like provision of quality healthcare, receivables management and risk management. Since medical transcription is a process that requires concentrated investment in terms of time, capital and other resources to produce optimum results, outsourcing medical transcription to a professional medical transcription company has been found to be an effective solution.

In fact outsourcing medical transcription has many benefits including that of forming the base for quality healthcare. Though medical transcription does not directly affect the quality of care provided by the healthcare facility, it helps strengthens the cornerstones of quality healthcare services.

How do outsourced medical transcription services form the base for quality for healthcare services?

The cornerstones that form the basis of quality services are the reputation of the healthcare facility, referrals, quality and timeliness of services. Outsourced medical transcription services provide support for all these aspects:

Reputation: Though medical transcription services do not directly contribute to building the reputation, medical transcription services have an important role to play in the process leading to this and thereby in two main aspects:

1. Provision of quality care by providing accurate, timely, legible, clear and detailed patient medical record which help in the diagnostic and care process
2. Risk management by ensuring that proper documentation is maintained to show the sequence of care, which ensures that the risk of malpractice litigation is minimized
3. By ensuring HIPAA and HITECH compliance during the medical transcription process, service providers help in increasing the confidence of patients in the healthcare facility.

• Easing and increasing the process of referrals: Proper documentation of the care process leads to better communication between healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities, resulting in referrals.

• Helps improve quality of services: Proper information forms the basis for healthcare and medical transcription ensures that the patient medical records are created in a way that minimizes the strain on healthcare professionals, intuitively lending itself to the operations of healthcare facilities, using advanced technology that is easy to use to ensure smoother operations.

• Helps quicken provision of healthcare: Creation of patient medical records using the services of a professional medical transcription company has several benefits that help speed up the care process, with features like:

1. Allowing dictation as a means of information collection – helping increase healthcare professionals’ productivity
2. Flexible modes of dictation
3. Customized modes of document delivery
4. Facilitating faster turnaround time as needed
5. Providing editing and proofreading services for speech recognition software transcription
6. Specialty based transcription ensuring accuracy and speed from the very beginning.

It can be seen that quality medical transcription services can help strengthen the base of healthcare by building up the cornerstones of healthcare.

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 and reliable medical transcription services from TransDyne, click here.