Role of Medical Transcription Services in Business

Medical transcription services play a vital role for development of medical related businesses. The hub of the duties of the hospitals, clinics, private health care units and health related departments is to provide the best possible treatment to their patients. The treatment should be timely, effective, appropriate and highly efficient. The medical and paramedical staff should consider it their foremost duty.

It makes the Job Easy

Fighting with the papers and files like stuff whole day do not allow them to focus on their core duties. One of the most distracting duties is the medical transcription. The best way to get out of this situation is to outsourcing medical transcription services. What will you get is the improved and streamlined operations from doctors and other staff. Once a doctor has the record of all patients he has to deal with throughout the day, he is at ease of mind and can do his duties in the most professional way. His mind remains at peace and can perform his core duty very well. This will improve the results of the institutes and hence the patients will be willing to pay a good and healthy tribute.

No time related issues

A hospital is visited by varying patients with different ailments and at different times. It’s a continuous process and so is the medical transcription. These services help you to maintain a database of your patients at any time. The turnaround is always in time and every day you are ready to go with the daily routine work with a transcribed file. That’s what you can get by hiring these services.

Medical Transcription Outsourcing - What Are The Advantages?

Running a healthcare facility successfully is a balancing act requiring that a delicate equilibrium be maintained between providing quality care and maintaining profitability. To deliver quality healthcare it is imperative for healthcare facilities to clearly establish those tasks that are an integral part of the healthcare delivery chain and outsource the rest of the inputs.

This ensures that the focus is not diluted and quality is not compromised. One such input that plays a vital role in the provision of healthcare is information from patient medical records. Medical transcription is the process of creating patient medical records from the audio recording of the patient- healthcare professional encounter.

This is a specialized skill requiring several inputs in the form of people skills, equipment and processes to be able to deliver transcripts that are accurate, timely and secure. Having patient medical records transcribed in-house tends to not only dilute the focus of the healthcare facilities from the core business but also tends to divert resources away from the core business.

One easy fix to ensure patient medical records are created without compromising quality standards and dilution of focus is to outsource the entire process to a professional service provider. This provides healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals with numerous advantages.

What are the advantages of outsourcing?

Outsourcing the process of creating patient medical records to a professionally managed service provider basically provides numerous advantages, like:

Reduced costs: One of the main advantages of outsourcing is that of the substantial savings on cost. This enables elimination of fixed cost of transcription to a large extent and enables the conversion of these costs to variable costs, totally depending on the volume of transcription required.

Faster turnaround time: Another advantage is that of ensuring that the transcripts are made available on time. Outsourced medical transcription service providers use a combination of the right team and the right technology to ensure that dictation files are transcribed speedily so as to meet the turnaround time commitments

Improved patient care and quality: Outsourcing ensures that quality standards of accuracy and turnaround time are maintained. Having accurate patient medical records available on time helps healthcare professionals in providing quality care.

Develop more efficient billing procedures: The data in patient medical records is the basis for coding and billing. Prompt turnaround time of transcripts helps speed up the coding and billing process

Legal usage: Patient medical records are an important part of risk management, as they chronicle the diagnosis and treatment process. Having descriptive, accurate and timely creation of records help in case of litigation

Streamline document distribution management: Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that there is proper process available for collecting dictation of healthcare professionals and a proper system for distribution of transcripts. Delivery of transcripts can be made to folders specified by the healthcare professional, features like automated printing & faxing, delivery to multiple healthcare professionals, easy to search archives help enhance the working life of healthcare professionals.

Outsourced medical transcription services provide vital support to healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities in various aspects. However while outsourcing it is important to source a service provider that can provide services that are accurate, speedy, secure, cost- effective and using technology that provides numerous benefits.

Transcription Software Has Changed the Role of the Medical Transcriptionist

Many professions have been changed due to the proliferation of personal computers and all of the functionality that they deliver. Few have been affected as much as the job of the medical transcriptionist. As speech recognition technology has been improved, a medical transcriptionist can now produce much more output than they were once able to.

There may have been a time when people in the industry were worried about the long-term prospects of being a medical transcriptionist. The way that the technology was progressing would seem to suggest that they would eventually be completely replaced by speech recognition technology. It is not likely that this will ever happen, and as advanced as medical transcription software becomes it will always be necessary to have somebody looking at the finished document before it is returned to a patient's file. The information that is contained in that document is simply too important to leave entirely to the transcription software.

The major difference that this transcription software has made in the role of the medical transcriptionist is to make them more efficient. If you have ever used voice recognition technology, you probably found that you could get it to correctly identify most of the words you spoke. You probably also noticed that it did not insert any punctuation without you having to tell it to.

More advanced transcription software is now available that can turn recorded speech into something that is fairly close to the final text output. Artificial intelligence software can identify many of the sentence breaks and insert a large amount of the punctuation so that the medical transcriptionist does not have to. If you consider how long it would take a transcriptionist to go through a document simply to put in all of the punctuation, you could see that they may become twice as productive if they do not have to do this.

Many companies that have taken advantage of transcription software with a complete platform that is suitable for use anywhere. Most of the actual speech recognition occurs on a remote server and is then sent to a medical transcriptionist. At that point they will have software on their computer that they can use to review and edit the document before returning it. In most cases the process of returning the document to the client is an automated one, and also does not require much time on the part of the transcriptionist.

One of the things that this setup can allow for is to have a medical transcriptionist work effectively at a home office. Different medical transcription companies may hire employees or people to work as independent contractors to complete their transcription work. This can present an advantage both those people who no longer have to commute and to the companies that will not have to spend the money to purchase or lease office space.

The advances in transcription software don't just benefit the workers and the companies who hire them. Medical professionals can now have shorter turnaround times for updates to patient files. The patients will also benefit because there files are more current and can store more information.

Transcription software has made the medical transcription industry more productive. Reports can now be delivered more accurately and in less time. Learn more about what the best transcription software can do.

How to dictate Operative Reports?

The quality of transcripts transcribed by medical transcriptionist is dependent on how the medical records are dictated by physicians.

There are multiple parts of operative reports and it should be dictated in the following order

1. Always dictate Patient’s Name (first and last) in the beginning of report. And if its spelled out ensures no mistake.

2. Second most important information is the Patient’s HUN # (Medical Record Number)

3. And then followed by Date of Admission and Date of Procedure

4. Its always good to dictate Primary Physician/Surgeon to avoid any ambiguity

5. Assistant(s) if any

6. Description of Findings

7. Preoperative Diagnosis

8. Postoperative Diagnosis

9. Anesthesia (Not required, but strongly recommended)

10. Description of Procedure(s)

11. Specimen(s) removed

Medical transcription service provides high quality transcription service at very competitive price

Web based Online EMR an overview

With the HIPAA coming into force, we see a number of companies and service providers coming up with their “Online EMR” softwares. It is good to have automation, no doubt. Let us consider the actual facts. Starting from now, we will try to view the scenario from one point of view at a time.

It is well known that every lock has a key and no matter how advanced a lock is there is always someone who comes up with a key to it to enter illegally. Same is the case with portals or online data. No matter how much security there is, whether 128 bit encryption or 256 bit there is bound to be someone who will get past that in order to get to the data. So obviously what is supposed to be the most confidential data (related to the patient) is always going to be at risk of landing into wrong hands. It is okay that the clinic should have a system so that the patient can have access to his record at any time. But how are we to know if the data is really safe and has not reached a person who has nothing to do with it? Take for example social networking sites who provide the user with a wide range of options to share what they want and with whom they want to share. Yet it is now known that even these sites could not protect the user’s information and the sites were hacked. If the data leaks from the server due to such reasons who will be responsible? We hope this has been considered before going ahead with such a kind of automation.

We will discuss things one by one over a period of time. Watch out for more to come on this subject.

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Top Ten Disadvantages Of Working From Home As A Transcriptionist

I read an article discussing the disadvantages of working from home - as a medical transcriptionist. Here's the list: 

• Missing Relationships
• Lethargy
• Distractions
• Tend To Over Work
• Employee Benefits
• Owning And Maintaining A Workstation
• Book Keeping
• Financial Security
• Backup Action Plans

The list above applies not only to medical transcription but all industries as well. It's also a case-to-case basis, depending on how you mentally prepare yourself to be in this situation, how you handle things and what works for you while working at home. 

I kind of like the idea which is why I'm working at home for the past six (6) months now. However, I'm not without problems. One of the biggest challenge was to find the right employer (yes working at home does not mean you are you're own boss, and most of us really are employees as well, but on a different working environment - well sort of). I moved to three (3) different employers in the span of six (6) months. Perhaps it's me, but I also have some issues with those employers as well. It should be a win-win situation and that both parties respect and understand each others situation.  Over that short period of time, I learned to adapt. 

Don't get me wrong, there are also benefits of working at home, that's why a lot people are enticed to doing so. However, when not prepared, and you don't instill discipline, you'll wind up with all these troubles presented above. 
Medical transcription services

RADIOLOGY TRANSCRIPTION

First of all, to understand radiology transcription, one would have to know what radiology stands for. Radiology is a word comprising of one prefix, i.e., radio- and one suffix, i.e., -logy with the former meaning "radiation" and the latter "study of any given subject".

Having said that, now we come to what radiology transcription is.

Radiology transcription jobs are a branch of Medical Transcription that specializes in patients undergoing radiology procedures. Let us elaborate.

Every day, all over the country, patients are in and out of hospitals, clinics, and urgent care centers. While there, they are given multiple tests and undergo several different procedures. Often patients are under the care of multiple people at once including nurses, specialists, and physicians.

Now keep in mind that all of this activity must be recorded in the patient’s records for future reference. It must all be combined with all of the patient’s past history and any other relevant information concerning the patient’s treatment. This is vital for two reasons.
· Number one is the health of the patient. All activity must be documented to ensure the patient is getting the best treatment possible.
· Reason number two is to protect the hospital in the case of their activities being called into question.

This is where the transcriptionist comes in. If you are looking for jobs in radiology transcription, your job will revolve around recording various activities for patients undergoing radiology treatments and procedures.

You may simply be helping keep records of ultrasounds, x-rays, and sonograms received by the patient. You may also be working on the therapy side of radiology where your transcriptionist job will include keeping records of chemotherapy and other forms of radiology treatment.

How do you know if you have what it takes to get a radiology transcription job?

Requirements

Needless to say, radiology transcription jobs require excellent knowledge of computers along with fast and accurate typing skills but that is not all. A radiology transcriptionist should also have a good working knowledge of medical terms and procedures. You will spend a great deal of time transcribing information from doctor’s recordings, and you will need to know the terms that are being used in order to ensure your record is correct.

As a radiology transcriptionist, you will also be required to have excellent grammar and spelling skills and the ability to research information in medical texts when you feel it is necessary, i.e., when a term comes up with which you are not familiar. Finally, you should be able to work independently if you are interested in a transcription job. Many transcriptionists work from home and under minimal supervision.

How to gain the necessary skills?

Most transcription jobs require previous experience in the field. Naturally, in order to get experience, you need to land the first job first and the quickest way to do that is through training via Internet or a learning center.

Keep in mind that if you are interested in radiology transcription jobs in particular, you will need to brush up on the area of interest and learn as much as possible about radiology.

The field of radiology transcription jobs is fairly competitive. Among all Medical Transcription service jobs, radiology seems to attract a great deal of interest and little wonder the field of x-rays, ultrasounds, and chemotherapy is one of the most fascinating medical fields working today.

Medical Transcription Line Counting Quick Tip

Most medical transcriptionists are paid by the line. It is fairly standard now on your word processing program to have built in line and word counters, with or without spaces. I use Microsoft Word and it has this feature. 

The normal line is usually considered to be 65 characters long. Every letter, symbol, and space between each word is included in the character count. If you are counting your lines, group together your shorter line to make one line. If you have half lines do not charge the doctor for a whole line. 
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Medical transcription

Medical transcription outsourcing: Helps streamline and improve operations

Providing quality healthcare is a continuous process, involving constant endeavors to improve on quality of services while still maintaining profitability. The healthcare process is complex and therefore the operations of healthcare facilities immaterial of the size of the facility or the number of healthcare professionals working, is very complicated.

The healthcare process requires inputs from very various sources to meet the standards of quality healthcare of being safe, appropriate, timely, and cost effective. To this end healthcare facilities have to increase their focus on their core activity- that of providing quality healthcare and outsource the rest of the processes that are not part of their core business. One such activity that has a role to play in the healthcare process is medical transcription, which is the process of creating patient medical records from the narration of the healthcare professional regarding the patient- healthcare professional encounter.  Outsourcing medical transcription can help the healthcare facility streamline and improve their operations.

How does outsourcing medical transcription help streamline and improve operations of the healthcare facility?

Outsourcing medical transcription to the right medical transcription service provider can help the healthcare facilities improve their operations at several levels:

·                     By creating patient records on time: Patient records provide an important support to the treatment process by providing the healthcare professionals a summary of the patient's medical history. Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that patient records are created on time. This not only supports the healthcare professional by providing a valuable diagnostic tool, but also helps in accelerating the reimbursement process.

·                     By accurate creation of transcripts: Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that the quality of patient records is maintained by accurately and comprehensively capturing all details. The outsourced service provider would be able to ensure maximum accuracy by having teams of trained medical transcriptionists to execute the medical transcription work and also ensuring that all transcripts are put through a rigorous quality check process to minimize errors.

·                     By providing support for varying volumes of transcription requirement: The volume of medical transcription support required is impossible to predict, as it depends on the inflow of patients at any given time. Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that the accuracy and turnaround time of medical transcription are unaffected in spite of fluctuations in volume.

·                     By allowing healthcare professionals to retain familiar modes of dictation:Allowing healthcare professionals and support staff the flexibility to retain familiar modes of dictation ensures that they can optimize their time for maximum productivity.

·                     By providing regular job summaries: Keeping track of dictations, work in progress and transcripts can be a tedious and time-consuming task, especially in healthcare facilities with high volumes. Outsourcing medical transcription can make managing transcription much easier by providing a job summary of the work enabling them to track of it.

·                     By enabling easy access to older transcripts: Many outsourced medical transcription services providers archive the older transcripts after a certain period of time. The support staff at the healthcare facility can easily access these files as and when required using various search criteria.

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·                     By providing diverse modes of document delivery: Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that transcripts are delivered to the healthcare facility, the healthcare professionals and the support staff in a secure and efficient mode through the mode specified by them.

·                     By reducing cost of medical transcription: Outsourcing medical transcription results in a substantial savings on cost of transcription both direct and indirect. In fact outsourcing converts the fixed cost of medical transcription to variable cost restricted to the extent of usage of services.

·                     By providing technology that is easy to use: Outsourcing medical transcription provides software and tools for transcription that enables various features that benefit the healthcare facility and the healthcare professionals in various ways while still being easy to use.

·                     By enabling adoption of EMR: Outsourced medical transcription service providers enable the healthcare facilities to protect existing investments in EMR by providing HL7 interface.

Medical transcription outsourcing: A systematic approach to healthcare documentation

Healthcare as a service though essential and vital easily lends itself to chaos due to the variability of the requirement for this service. Often times neither patients nor healthcare professionals are able to plan the healthcare process ahead of time, as emergency situations do not lend themselves to planning. Keeping this in mind the approach to successfully managing any healthcare facility is to ensure that the support systems take on a systematic approach ensuring that healthcare professional and other support staff are in a position to deal with varied situations as they may arise.

Having an outsourced medical transcription service provider support the medical transcription needs of the healthcare facility helps in taking on a systematic approach to managing healthcare information. Partnering with a committed, technologically savvy and professional medical transcription company as a partner for the patient medical record creation needs provides the following benefits:

• A systematic approach to collection of information: The data for creating the patient medical record is generated from the patient- healthcare professional encounter. Over the years healthcare professionals have shown a marked preference for dictation as a mode of capturing this information. Medical transcription companies provide healthcare professionals not only the option to retain dictation as the means of collecting information, but also allow them to use dictation devices of their choice. Furthermore medical transcription service providers also make provisions for this data to be automatically transmitted for transcription by programming the upload system to automatically transmit this data at periodic intervals ensuring delays in transcription are minimized

• Professional transcription ensuring quality: Once the audio files have been collected and transmitted to the medical transcription company premises, these files are allotted to specialty trained medical transcriptionists based on the nature of work. After transcription, each transcript is put through a multiple level quality process to ensure maximum accuracy.  Medical transcription service providers also provide professional editing and proofreading services for transcripts created by speech recognition software to ensure acceptable accuracy levels

• Customized templates/ formats: Each specialty of medicine has their report template/ format. Moreover there could be variations on this depending on the preference of healthcare professionals. Medical transcription service providers provide transcripts as per the customization specified by the healthcare facility. The specifications of each healthcare professional / healthcare facility are systematically noted and transcripts are created according to the specifications.

• Turnaround time options: Another aspect that is streamlined by outsourcing medical transcription is the turnaround time. Medical transcription companies offer various turnaround time options to healthcare professionals, which help them have access to information depending on their requirement. For e.g. Emergency situation require shorter turnaround time than normal situations.

• Diverse document delivery modes: Medical transcription companies also offer document delivery mode options, which are customized to the specifications of healthcare professionals /healthcare facilities. Options like delivery to specific folders, automatic print options, delivery to more than one healthcare professional etc are offered.

• HL7 interface: Medical transcription service providers also offer Hl7 interface for EMR/ EHR adoption while still retaining the dictation-transcription method of documenting the patient encounter.

It can be concluded that outsourcing medical transcription needs to a professional medical transcription service provider provides a systematic approach to healthcare documentation.

How Radiology Transcription Benefits Radiology Clinics and Practice Groups

Radiology transcription service reduces the workload of medical professionals and prevents any kind of backlog due to the quick turnaround time ensured. The service is available for individual physicians, hospitals, multi-specialty facilities, radiology clinics and practice groups.

Radiology transcription services include transcription of SOAP notes on a daily basis; transcription of summaries and follow-up notes; transcription of the medical history of patients with evaluation reports; transcription of all kinds of radiology reports including CT, MRI, bone density and X-rays and more. Radiology transcription companies provide a wide range of benefits for radiology clinics and practice groups. Listed here are some points that show how radiology transcription benefits radiology clinics and practice groups.

• Helps medical professionals concentrate on their core business activities and serve the needs of their patients much better. 
• Streamlines business operations effectively
• Healthcare professionals can significantly reduce capital investments, expenses and overhead, resulting in significant savings on cost (40% to 60%) 
• Increased profitability
• Free up resources 
• No need to recruit additional workforce to carry out transcription activities, thus saving on time, efforts and resources
• Eases the burden on a company’s I.T department. There is no need to worry about the ever-changing technologies. 
• No additional maintenance expenses on IT infrastructure
• Enhances the flexibility of your organization
• Provides access to expertise
• Provides backup copies of patient records: this helps the physicians easily access even old patient records. In addition, these records can be sent to multiple destinations via the internet, which means physicians can keep in touch with their patients even if they are out of station. 
• 24 x7 x 365 customer care support 
• Rapid turnaround time
• Operational control – enables you to have better control of your business
• Reduces overhead cost
• Complete data security
• Highly secure file transfer options
• Competitive pricing
• Assured data quality 
• High level of accuracy
• Confidentiality of data 

Considering the benefits it offers for radiology clinics and practice groups, radiology transcription service has become an extremely profitable option for the healthcare industry today.

At present, there are so many radiology transcription companies that offer transcription of all medical records related to the radiology department by making use of advanced software and technology. Try to choose a radiology transcription company that offers customized services. Browsing web directories and searching yellow pages are the best ways to locate an efficient radiology transcription service provider