Is EHR a potent threat for medical transcription industry?

EHR is one of the upcoming trends in digitized healthcare services. Its full form is Electronic Health Records which entails the recording of the patient data in a real-time scenario. It involves documenting the patient medical history and their diagnosis as well as their current treatment and their allergic tendencies. Thus it is beneficial to a doctor as well as patient to use the EHR whole keeping the information safe and secured. 

Accuracy and speed

The main threat that EHR poses to the medical transcription is that EHR is accurate and can be operated both by the patient and the physician. It is also a very speedy process due to its real-time attribute. In contrast, medical transcription does not provide the real-time data input and data sharing option. 

Cost

In this aspect medical transcription gets leverage as compared to EHR. EHR is a costly process that involves the use of software for documentation and real-time data sharing and processing. 

With the application of EHR, the patient data entry has been modified to specialized formats changing the role of a transcriptionist. However there has been long term argument on the fact that "Can EHR be a better option than medical transcription?..some believe that due to its better technological upgradation and real-time approach it is far more preferable. On the contrary, some healthcare professionals feel that EHR usage consumes a lot of time of the physicians. Apart from this EHR requires effective patient data maintenance which is not done by most of the healthcare organizations. Thus EHR can never be a replaceable option to medical transcription. In addition, EHR might not have all the provisions to record patient diagnosis. This, on the contrary, is available in case of ICD 10 based medical transcription. 

Thus it can be finally summed up and inferred that EHR although being perceived as a threat to medical transcription can be taken as an upgradation to the whole process. With the advent of speech recognition, voice recordings are converted to textual formats. These textual formats are then fed into the EHR system. This can be achieved by training of the transcriptionists in their updated job role. This will thus ensure effective patient data documentation and holistic patient care with digitized approaches.