Is medical transcription a boon or a curse to the healthcare system?

Good documentation practice (GDP) is the basic rule in the healthcare industry. Patient's data like their case history, medication, medical tests that are recommended to them by the health physicians are recorded. The medical transcription process brought an evolution to the field of the healthcare system. Do you know how this medical transcription helps in maintaining patient's data and increase the proficiency of the entire healthcare system? Would you like to know the story behind it? Yes, there is an interesting story that finely states that's why medical transcription is a boon and not a curse to the entire healthcare system. Let's have a look into it.

What led to medical transcription process?

Before, doctors used to be the in-charge of maintaining the entire patient's data. It used to be done manually before the 20^th century. But they have so many other responsibilities to perform.  To reduce the burden of paperwork and its maintenance, medical transcription started where all the patient's data and the doctor's prescription started being recorded.

Another most common problem in this era is the illegible handwriting of doctors which are really difficult to be spelled by a patient. Again, patients can tell their health issues but in general, they fail to tell the name of the medicines that are prescribed to them. This misinterpretation of doctor's suggestion from the unpredictable and illegible prescription creates trouble in the entire treatment process. This happens especially when the patients are handed over from one doctor to the other one. In order to maintain error-free accuracy of the entire treatment process in the healthcare system as well as in the documentation process, the medical transcription process has brought an evolutionary effect.

Early phase of medical transcription process

In the very early stage of medical transcription all the medical transcriptionist or better to say the stenographers used to type all the data related to a patient’s health conditions, their medication, medical tests etc. But this process found to be too tedious over time. They started copying the notes that were prescribed by the health physician to a particular patient. Soon the job started being more advanced when those stenographers started the doctor’s dictations in shorthand process.

But since medical transcription is a vast process that deals with huge healthcare system related data. The demand of keeping recorded data started increasing which also increased the burden of paper work. Then the actual magic happened. Another more advanced evolution happened this time that allowed voice recording or speech recording. Yes, medical transcription process got a new path.

Speed Recording Software and evolution of Medical Transcription Process

The advent of the speech recording device and the software increased the proficiency of medical transcription to an advanced level. This evolutionary wave added on the actual spice in to the entire healthcare system. This involved the use of computers and internet that made the entire medical transcription process easier, faster, accurate and more efficient. Through this medical transcription process, all the data related to a healthcare system gets exchanged over internet.

Doctor’s conversation with a patient is recorded by the speech recognition device which further gets transcribed by the medical transcriptionists. This has created a new requirement of professional skills where medical transcriptionist can edit all the healthcare system related data and record it efficiently and more accurately.

What changed?

Themedical transcription process has made the entire healthcare system more predictable. As it records all the data and directly convert the speech via mandated electronic medical record system which simply has evolved the imperative role of a medical transcriptionist, the entire healthcare system, its processes and medications have become much easier to understand to a general patient as well as to the other medical experts and staffs who takes care of a patient.

The entire medical industry can get the benefit out of this medical transcription process as they transfer or exchange all the healthcare system related data, patient's records of case history, medications, and medical examinations, etc.

In recent years, all the medical transcriptionists use the EMR template which is nothing but the so-called electronic medical records system. These EMR templates are highly used by the professionals and expert medical transcriptionist who also acts as a medical facilitator. These medical facilitators help all the health physicians and train them in order to improvise the entire healthcare system and the medical transcription process. Today voice recognition software has even made easier to decipher the audio having background noise or heavy accent narrations.

To wrap up

Scott Faulkner, the CEO of InterFix LLC and a renowned technology provider has described the medical transcription process as a repetitive documentation process that is a well predictable language model and can be efficiently handled via speech recognition process.

George Bernard Shaw well said once that ‘people, who can't change their minds, can't change anything and every progress requires a change'. From the history of medical transcription, it can be easily said that there had been a lot of changes that took place and this has highly increased the proficiency of the entire healthcare system. So, are you still confused about the medical transcription thinking about whether it is a boon or a curse to the medical system????????