How Medical Transcription Outsourcing Wins
The advantages of medical transcription outsourcing are clear enough. The medical transcriptionist can provide accurate and timely clinical documentation to enhance care and ensure compliance. This is a far better option than overburdening the physician or healthcare staff with documentation tasks.
Early Skepticism over Medical Transcription While medical transcription has been around for quite some time, some healthcare practices did not support delegating documentation tasks to third party service providers. Instead, physicians were assigned the responsibility of entering information into electronic health records (EHRs). To save time with the task, physicians resorted to measures that saved more time, but this has resulted in errors creeping in. This ultimately proved to be more costly, but continued to be practiced.
Direct Documentation by Physicians Risky Back in 2012, healthcare institutions would look to bring down costs by requiring physicians to directly document into the structured EHR fields. Physicians would use short cuts for
making the documentation process quicker but the risk of mistakes due to inappropriate template and copy/paste use was very high. It’s just that healthcare institutions failed to realize that outsourcing medical transcription could ultimately saving operating costs, effort, resources and improving efficiency, contributing to better service and improved profitability. Medical transcription outsourcing is user-friendly and can be easily integrated into the workflow of the physician. It helps the documentation process to be monitored more effectively.
Physicians can dictate information without having to keep looking at the
computer screen. Direct documentation into the EHR by the physician would interfere with the physician-patient interaction. Dictation of patient information, as is the case with medical transcription, ensures that the patient’s story is narrated and all the minute details are captured.
Shortcomings of NLP Medical transcription was compared with NLP (natural language processing) which was used for creating encoded data from the narrative information. But it has its shortcomings in that it does not accommodate the discussion of the validation process required for ensuring the accuracy of the results. The dictation by the physician and the effort by the transcriptionists, editors and proofreaders ensure that this happens. The human element also ensures that it isn’t merely mechanical effort. The document management system of an efficient medical transcription service can accommodate hardware and software requirements of the transcription company, create archives of the document and audio, create reports showing each file’s progress, enable online editing and review of each file, and enable digital signature functionalities. This system ensures the information is checked and re-checked to ensure accuracy.
Preventing Errors in the EHR With NLP-driven processes the role of a Healthcare Documentation Specialist, who validates the capture of discrete data elements and data structure by the NLP for uploading to EHR, is important. The Healthcare Documentation Specialist prevents errors from creeping into the EHR. Entrusting these tasks to a medical transcription outsourcing company can contribute to saving time and streamline the functioning of the healthcare practice. Comprehensive medical billing and coding, and EHR entry services are also usually offered, which help
doctors focus on patient needs above everything else. This is particularly relevant for physicians and healthcare institutions that regularly handle a high influx of patients.
Contact MTS Transcription Services 8596 E. 101st Street, Suite H Tulsa, OK 74133 Main: (800) 670 2809 Fax: (877) 835-5442 E-mail: info@managedoutsource.com