Four signs that prove you need to outsource medical transcription

With the popularity of the Medical Transcription profession, outsourcing this service is preferable for its accuracy and compliance with various Health and security regulations. Mostly this is a misconception that preparing medical Transcription is a time-consuming and pain-stricken job. However, the reality is if this could be done with little strategically, then it can be equally less painful.

Medical Transcription mostly involves the role of full proofing medical records, getting easy access to patient personal medical information and others. To increase transparency in this process and make it cost-effective, more accurate and time-saving, there is no better option than Outsourcing. If any company wants to provide a better and efficient medical transcription service, they should go through the following 4signs for Outsourcing medical transcription. 

1. Minimize Labour and cost : 

Medical transcription done by in-house professionals could be more time-consuming and budget-draining. Moreover, they need to offer a high salary to hire such high-skilled professionals. The outsourcing procedure could resolve this issue. For example, the labour market is more cost-effective in South Asian countries like India than in the USA. So, if a US company outsources their work tomedical transcribers in these countries, itcould be more cost-effectivefor them.

 2. Better accessibility: 

 One of the biggest reasons for medical Transcription or medical documentation is to retrieve medical records from the database management system. Better accessibility is the prime concern, and it is because of this facility, medical staff can easily search for data digitally whenever needed. Medical transcription online services outsourced to India have experts who are skilled in recording data from audio and video files in the easy-to-index digital text so that data could be easily accessible. 

 3. Accuracy: 

Another sign that helps to gain the utmost customer satisfaction is Accuracy. In this concern, hiring skilled and trained medical transcribers is essential. For example, experts from the Medical transcription service are experienced in typewriting. Most of them are efficient in typing 200-250 words in a minute on average. Thus, for them, this work of transcribing a long-duration audio file is not much tiresome and time-consuming. Moreover, they use the extra time in making the files more accurate by a multi-step review process. They also use advanced speech technology to understand some language-specific medical jargon so that 100% accuracy is achieved. 

 4. Leveraging industrial experience: 

Outsourcing Medical dictation services provide its clients with the best industrial experience, whichhas developed the array of collecting medical records. These include operative notes, a summary of discharge, progress records of patients, the procedure of emergency room and others. You can be ensured with the accuracy and data security of the patient files if you outsource medical transcription service having experienced and cross-leverage. 

Unlike many transcription companies, if you outsource Medical transcription files you can gain leverage by getting your records transcribed from different time-zones. With the implementation of HIPAA compliance, a hospital or a health care organization can be ensured with the protection and confidentiality of PHI even if they outsource medical transcription services.

Is unstructured data more useful in medical transcription?

Unstructured data in medical transcription is the information collected and logged that does not follow a particular flow or pattern. With the technology becoming more advanced by days, the digital data in healthcare is gearing up the industry to a great extent and are finding new, better and effective ways of patient care. It is necessary for the US that patients are filling up forms and these forms build up records and are used as their medical history for any future diagnosis. However, the new thing is how these data are stored in the digital spaces.

With data becoming more prominent in healthcare, doctors are now more focused on the best way to collect these data from patients. While structured data comes up with obvious values, unstructured data offers more accuracy. From the very beginning, doctors decide whether to ask the same set of questions to the patients that visit them or whether they should collect their intimate details to create rich patient profiles. In medical transcription, structured data is no longer the only place from which meaning information can be collected and derived. It has become more feasible for the healthcare industry to analyze unstructured data sources.

In the case of unstructured notes, doctors only collect specific details that they seem to be relevant to the patient cases. Hence these do not streamline perfectly with the other patient's data. So, what are the benefits of unstructured notes? Unstructured notes are believed to enhance patient care and if experts can find meaningful ways in which these notes can be organized, it could lead to a big breakthrough.

Unstructured data plays an important role in fraud detection. Care cost in healthcare is high, and we need to know if people are at risk before they actually get sick. Not only that, but healthcare providers also need to stay up to date with new researches which helps in providing better patient care. Yes, structured data can provide the necessary streamline information needed by doctors. However, to solve any business problem it will be like finding a needle in the haystack. Many times structured data only solves problems partially, but, during situations like these healthcare providers mostly rely on the unstructured notes.

At times it is seen that two patients with the same diagnosis can have two different paths to recovery based on their social disparities. Information about these cannot be readily available in the structured data forms but in the unstructured ones. Unstructured data sets like physician notes can be of rescue in scenarios like these.

We set a few other examples of these unstructured data that comes up to rescue in medical transcription:

Ø  Medical journals read by machines to extract relevant information to make these available to the providers

Ø  Different notes can be analyzed to detect any negative or positive patient sentiments and for finding out opportunities to reduce call volume and call handling time.

Ø  Doctors’ notes can be easily mined for medical documentation accuracy, disease onset prediction, etc.

A Day of a Medical Transcriptionist...

Been thinking about entering the health care industry? Or maybe, start off a career as a Medical Transcriptionist? If so, then you must be thinking what a typical day in the life of a Medical Transcriptionist will be like?

In a way, it can be said that Medical Transcriptionists are a very important part and play an essential role in the health care industry. You take the audio files of doctors, medical experts or healthcare specialists and transcribe them into written documents. This needs to be done so that the medical personnel that is diagnosing or taking care of the patients are having all the necessary information about their patients.

You will rarely interact with patients however; the role you play is going to be crucial. You may be employed in a doctor’s office, MT service providing companies or choose to simply work from home. In a typical day, you take the recordings of doctors and feed them into the computer database. Also, expand the abbreviated versions and shorthands of doctors into language form which can be understood by the audience at large. Like a good medical transcriptionist, you need to be acquainted with all the medical terminology along with how to use speech recognition software.

So hold on tight & give it a try…it might be the career for you & of course, won't be something you will regret about!!!

Common homophones bloopers made by Medical Transcriptionist

“Homophones bloopers? What is that?” This is our reaction when we speak of these two terms. To make things easier, let us break them one by one. Homophones are words that are pronounced the same, however, their meanings are different. These words may also differ in their spelling as well. On the other hand, blooper means a funny amusing mistake made by any person or an embarrassing error. In medical transcription often the doctors come across hilarious bloopers from a medical transcriptionist. Transcription errors creep in because the dictations are not clear or too many medical terms are stuffed in the audio files.

Due to these reasons, many misunderstandings happen at the medical transcriptionist’s end. A medical transcriptionist will vary in his skill and experience and may not be so well acquainted with medical terms when compared to another one. Here we have compiled a list of common and homophones bloopers made by a medical transcriptionist that are downright funny!

Ø  ‘History of sick as hell disease’ – sickle cell

Ø  ‘She was a bitch and grinned’ –a bit chagrined

Ø  ‘Patient was discharged with Homo Two’ –Home O2, which means oxygen

Ø  ‘The psycho team was consulted’ – psych OT, means occupational therapy

Ø  ‘Abnormal lover function was indicated in the lab test’ – Liver function

Ø  ‘The eye & nose are within normal limits’ – I & O

Ø  ‘The patient took their meds for beaver’ – forever

Ø  ‘Old occasional male of 49-year-old' – Caucasian male

Ø  ‘Respectablepancreatic cancer’ – Resectable

Ø  ‘Patient is alert, sedated on Propofol’ – alert & oriented, as well as sedated?

Often doctors use the Latin term ‘in extremis’ to indicate ‘at the point of death’. Due to the fact this term does not fall under the conventional medical terminology, a medical transcriptionist might not be aware of the same. If you are a medical transcriptionist make sure you are not transcribing ‘when brought to the ICU, the patient was found to be in extremis’ as ‘ when brought to the ICU, the patient was found to be an extremist.’

Transcriptionists often end up making numeric mistakes as well and they turn out to be deadly. While transcribing make sure these are typed correctly. A study once said that a woman died because of 30 time’s higher dose of medicine that made her blood thinner. Not funny at all!

You need to be careful with similar-sounding words, for example, hypotension and hypertension, dysphagia and dysphasia and many more. Moreover, you need to be equally cautious not to mix up homophones i.e. same words with different spelling and meaning. Examples of these words include ileum & ilium, pleural & plural, etc. Not only are these mistakes silly but errors like these will be completely changing the meaning of the report and will be affecting patient diagnosis. Yes, we do agree that the heavily accented doctors will be making your transcription job difficult, but if you are having any doubts it’s advised to consult the doctors about the same or leave the fields as blank.

Verbatim transcription and its use in EHR

As we know that medical transcription helps in documenting the conversation happened between a doctor and his patient. Since this transcription is based upon the video or audio files that represents the conversation to a transcriptionist, sometimes it becomes difficult to understand the words spelled by the doctor or the patient. Thus, while transcribing, an error may happen which induce discrepancies in the documentation process as well as in the entire healthcare management system. Suppose one diabetic patient is recommended by his doctor to have 8 units of insulin in a day. But due to transcriptional error, the patient is receiving 80 units of insulin instead of those 8 units of insulin. This really creates turbulence in the health care management system as the overdosage of the medicines creates health issues like brain damage, cardiac arrest and so on which are even life-threatening.

There are total three types of medical transcription process. Among them, verbatim transcription is one of the most time consuming and expensive process. You might think that medical transcriptionists are now using the voice recording files that get transcribed in the form of text but then how such error can take place right? This happens because of using the template structure that allows editing transcription, the other type among the three different types of transcription. 

Electronic Health Record system or EHR is basically the digital chart of a patient's details. This includes the different information about a patient like admission date and time, case history, previous treatment, ongoing treatment, the name of medicines recommended to the patient, medical tests etc. Now, this chart only represents the minute details that were told to the patient. Now while transcribing this data from a video file or an audio file can have misinterpretation. Or the written data might get misinterpreted by the patient party. This is dangerous. So, it is required to eliminate such issues that help in producing error-free details of a patient. Now, this verbatim transcription process helps a lot in this regard.

Do you want to know how this helps? Verbatim transcription allows to record the minute details of the conversation and the text format is represented exactly in the way it is told to the patient. Let me give you one example:

Lady: Our neighbor really helped us a lot. We received good support while taking my baby here. (Baby starts crying)

Doctor: How did your baby fell down? (Nurse is telling, sir everything is ready, you can start stitching).

Lady: Please take care of my baby (talking to her baby in between for 35seconds…….ummhh don't cry, my dear).

See this entire conversation includes the background sounds, other speech and most importantly the words are transcribed exactly in the way it was told to the doctor or to the patient’s mother. Recording of data and transcribing it in the same form helps in eliminating the errors caused by misinterpretation. That is what a verbatim transcription means. It represents not only the conversation between your doctor and your patient but also reflects their way of talking, perspectives, circumstances, and background sounds, etc. Don't you think that this is really awesome where you are not only getting your patient's minute details through the EHR system but also able to understand what exactly happened or told by the doctor.

Medical transcription week - 19 - 25 May 2019

Medical transcription is quite a well-known word among the healthcare professionals yet knowledge and skill gap exists in this sector even after its foundation some 25 years back.   The healthcare industry is highly dynamic in nature due to the application of technological and pharmacological innovations which is improving its efficiency and productivity. The medical transcription forms an integral part of this sector and forms the core pillar of the patient information documentation process. With the advent of technology, the older forms of manual documentation have been replaced by EHRs and VRE software. The healthcare documentation although plays a major role in countries like the US, UK, and Australia.  However, with the advent of medical transcription, there has been huge outsourcing to developing countries like India and the Philippines. The changing nature of transcription has changed the outsourcing pattern as well as the pattern of the work done. Thus, the upcoming technologies are restructuring and remodeling of the whole MT industry globally.

The National Medical Transcription Week is celebrated worldwide from May 19- May 25. This year’s theme is “Success is a journey”. Thus for being a successful MT, the journey needs to be fruitful with gathering knowledge and skills. The aim for this year’s medical transcription week is to improve the quality of the transcription works overall and to create newer job opportunities for the transcribers. In addition to this building up, a new skill base and maintaining integrity is also a major goal. So we must work together and make sure that our skills for documentation are updated and we are well versed with the new technologies so that we can play our part in the health sector efficiently. So decide how you want to sharpen your skill and add new feathers to your cap and be an accountable and dependable MT.  

“We are changing the World with technology”- Bill Gates

Medical transcription, a technological breakthrough in healthcare documentation practices, is flourishing solely due to the dynamism of technology in the last 10 years. Medical transcription can be defined as a “cocktail” between the classical healthcare services and the cutting edge technology. Currently people involved in the healthcare sector have resorted to newer and updated methods of medical documentation and recording leaving behind the age-old usage of recording tools.  The archaic technologies that were used is now replaced by medical transcription and voice recognition softwares. The considerable factors involved in medical transcription include automation and advanced reporting tools of medical reporting. Both of these are present in medical transcription and medical coding but there is a fine thread of difference between them. However keeping such conflicting issues aside and focusing on the global data of the medical transcription sector it can be seen that this sector has seen an astounding growth of $19.16 billion and is expected to reach a market value of $72.19 billion by 2022.   The medical transcription sector globally is estimated to experience a stupefying success with an annual growth of 6.48% over the years 2016-2020. 

The instigating factor behind the prosperity of this sector can be attributed to the demand for digitised medical documentation in the healthcare sector. There has been a shift from the ICD 9 to ICD 10 documentation standards which has owed to the stupendous growth in the need for medical transcription globally. With the increased demand for stringent medical documentation and the medical transcription sector has led to an increased rate of employment for many skilled youths. As of the data obtained till 2018 11600 people were employed in the medical transcription sector as compared to the employment of 10500 in the year 2008. This figure clearly establishes the growth in the medical transcription sector.

Is medical transcription and medical coding same?

Although medical transcription and medical coding sound to be somewhat similar they have a significant difference in the role they play in medical documentation. Medical transcription can be defined as a healthcare service sector were in the medical reports that are recorded by the healthcare professionals are transcribed. It involves a manual conversion of the voice recorded medical reports to the textual format. In contrast medical coding, also a healthcare service sector, involves the conversion of the medical reports of the patient into alphabetical and numeric codes that can be universally decoded. Medical coding also involves coding the services and the diagnostic procedures that are available for better medical documentation. The significant difference between medical transcription and medical coding is solely based on their purpose and their usage.

Medical coding involves retrieving patient medical diagnosis details as well as their billing details and encoding them in codes that are recognized in the country of practice. This plays a great deal in medical insurance coverage of the patients. Medical transcription, on the other hand, entails the textual conversion of physician to patient consultations and diagnosis. However, there is an interlinking of this with medical coding because after transcription a professional coding is necessary for medical insurance coverage related claims. However medical transcription, as opposed to medical billing, plays a significant role in patient care, diagnosis, and treatment. Medical transcription can be attributed to form a niche in the healthcare service sector in contrast to the medical coding which is widespread in all hospitals and healthcare organizations. It is estimated that recording patient interaction being a crucial task all healthcare organizations do not offer this service whereas most of the healthcare organizations have a medical coder. In contradiction to this however medical transcription and medical coding are indispensable and interdependent on each other. This is because with proper transcription of the patient information the coding is easy and effective.

The core essence of medical transcription can be attributed to the dictation by the physician. The transcribed information can be given manually in textual format or in the form of an electronic medical report. Additionally, medical coding also helps in medical record keeping but does not involve any dictation but is based on patient charts and the standard medical documentation codes. In addition, medical transcription is a service that benefits directly the physicians and patients. On the other hand, medical coding service not only benefits the physicians but also aids the private companies working in collaboration with healthcare organizations in providing medical insurance.

Thus finally we can come to this conclusion that although medical transcription and medical coding have a different purpose and require different skills and settings both are aimed at improving digitization in the healthcare setting with focus at holistic patient care.

10 must know facts about ICD 10 documentation for medical transcription

The term documentation plays a significant role in the healthcare sector. This can be attributed to the need for properly arranged patient history and the diagnosis data. This  in turn helps in the insurance claims for the patients as well as gaining insight into the patient medical history for pharmacological interventions. The ICD 10 plays a significant role in this aspect in the US healthcare sector. The medical codes that are present can be termed as the “bible” for a medical coder or a transcriber as they form the guidelines for medical coding and transcribing. However the codes that are present are not clear enough and most of the codes does not clearly describe the diagnosis of the patient. This vagueness is thought to be resolved by the shift from ICD 9 to ICD 10. Now for maintaining this ICD 10 codes and working based these coding guidelines it is necessary to keep in mind some important facts-  

1. Laterality forms the core of ICD 10 coding. It is essential that a physician mentions the letrality while coding. The mentioning of the right or left or bilateral clearly helps in easier patient care. 
2. Upgradeable technology is another important aspect of ICD 10  as it enables the patients to have access and use the latest upgraded technology
3. Documenting the period of care is also an essential aspect of the ICD 10 medical coding guidelines
4. ICD 10 involves 50 codes that enables the documentation of disease due to foreign body faster. This helps in better reviewing of the coded medical records and effective holistic care of the patient. 
5. ICD 10 helps a physician in documenting the stage of the disease as well as their seriousness and their chronic nature
6. The medical codes specified by the ICD 10 guidelines enables the transcriber to properly document the anatomical details of the patient for better patient care and diagnosis. 
7.  The coding system being fully digitised enables the users to have full access of the medical facilities and helps the physician's to get the patient data at a go. Thus this helps in providing quality care to the patient. 
8.  In addition to these the ICD 10 documentation guidelines involves the usage of the glasgow coma scale. This scale enables the physician to document the verbal as well as the motor and visual response of the patient. 
9.  The aim of ICD 10 being the resolution of vagueness in coding involves the Gustilo-Anderson scale for describing the types of open fractures and enabling better holistic care for patient.  
10.  Lastly the main essence of ICD 10 medical documentation guidelines lies in the specific definition of the patient condition. Thus it includes the detailed description of Myocardial infarction and its acuteness. 

Thus as a conclusionary remark it can be stated that ICD 10 has well developed features so as to make sure that the patients get quality care along with digitised services. Maintenance of these 10 must known facts will enable the patients as well as the physicians communicate well and resolve critical conditions with easy therapeutic options.