How Medical Transcription has evolved along with Advanced Technologies
By staying abreast with technological changes including EHR, medical transcriptionists help physicians deliver better care at lower costs.
MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTION SERVICE COMPANY 8596 E. 101st Street, Suite H Tulsa, OK 74133 Phone: 1-800-670-2809
Even with the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) medical transcription continues to be a vital and necessary aspect to ensure accurate clinical documentation. Medical transcription services are available for all specialties and transform physician dictation into accurate text. The reason why medical transcription companies are still relevant today is because they have adapted to the new technologies such as voice recognition and EHR. Voice Recognition and Medical Transcription Computer-based voice recognition has developed over the years with vast improvements in vocabulary size, development from single word recognition to better ability to handle natural language, recognition accuracy, and incorporation with other technologies. The physician interacts with the voice recognition software system on a local PC to generate immediate reports. Faster turnaround means faster reimbursement, which is crucial for large medical groups. However, this approach has many limitations. For instance, it needs clinicians to spend much more time on producing the report. The physician has to sit in front of the computer and read the entire report to correct errors if any, which can prove a time-consuming task in busy practices. The software is not perfect and it can misinterpret dictated dates, names, medical words, and procedures—which will have disastrous consequences unless checked and corrected. The software cannot interpret difficult accents correctly. Whether errors occur due to flaws in the software, mistakes on the part of the physician, background noise, or because the words were not clearly spoken, they still need to be corrected. The need for a set of human eyes is crucial and a medical transcription service provides the answer. The physician just has to dictate into a telephone or a recorder. The transcription task is performed by experienced professionals who can deliver high quality readable documents in quick turnaround time. Today, leading medical transcription companies have editors who have specialized skills to correct and edit reports generated by speech recognition software. EHR and Medical Transcription Medical transcriptionists (MTs) have also adapted their role to blend in with the introduction of EHRs. Medical transcription has become a component of EHRs. In other words, service providers now offer electronic medical record/electronic health record transcription interface solutions for hospitals, clinics and physician practices. An American Health Information Management Association report pointed out that many health care facilities have adopted a blended approach to physician documentation. Physician dictation is captured using different modalities based on physician preference, practice patterns, and document types. While structured history and physical templates may be entered by a physician assistant in one care setting, the best option for inpatient discharge summaries, encounter notes, findings, and assessments in another setting may be a dictated and transcribed narrative report. Today, physicians use the EHR templates but many still retain the dictation option for documenting a patient visit as it is impossible for them to capture their patients’ stories fully within checkbox templates. Medical transcription
www.medicaltranscriptionservicecompany.com
1-800-670-2809
services streamline processes without compromising the unique facts that matter for quality patient care. The bottom line is that the role of MTs will continue to evolve with technological advancement. It is up to them to adapt to these changes in order to stay relevant and help physicians provide better care at lower costs.
www.medicaltranscriptionservicecompany.com
1-800-670-2809