The Evolving Medical Transcription
Medical Transcription is a fast growing and evolving sector that has been influenced by many factors over the years. As preferences and standards have been constantly changing we see that one of the most significant aspects of medical transcription has been the shift to electronic patient record. What are the basic factors that have been responsible for evolution of the medical transcription sector of the healthcare industry? There are three basic factors;
Advancement in technology
Practice workflow
Regulations
There has been a lot of demand to enhance patient safety, increase efficiency, and reduce the cost of transcription. Outsourcing has been a solution provider in this regard. However, even though it has become mandatory for service providers and healthcare practices to migrate to a HIPAA compliant environment, there are many companies who still have to adhere to this requirement.
In the distant future one can be sure that the voice recognition software will greatly improve and may slowly even replace manual medical transcription. Adopted technologies such as speech recognition software and application service providers (ASPs) can keep up with the demands of regulations, standards, and cutting-edge demands in this sector. One can also expect that unlike today, medical coding may become embedded within documentation thereby not requiring it to be a separate process and help further reduce the overall cost of medical transcription.
The growing need for medical transcription to comply with basic Principles of documentation had been earlier developed by the Consensus Workgroup on Healthcare Documentation & Report Generation. It had looked into the following aspects of medical transcription.
Patient details
Accuracy of document
Completeness
Timeliness
Interoperability
Retrievability
Authentication
Accountability
Auditability
Confidentiality
Security
The change from old traditional methods is quickly taking place with the improvements in speech recognition technology and natural language processing, and more technologies trying to taking over the industry. It is very necessary that today’s MT professional must move with the times and not resist these inevitable changes of evolution.
About the Author: The author of this article is Ricci Mathew of Outsource Strategies International (OSI), a US based company that offers services in Medical Coding, Medical Billing, Medical Transcription for clients across the US
More articles by Riccimathew
Print Article | Download PDF | 17 views | Jun 20 2008
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