Medical Transcription Outsourcing – Helping Standardize The Healthcare Process

The healthcare process depends on proper information flow to provide quality care and accelerate reimbursements. The process of documenting the patient- healthcare professional encounter has evolved over the years from a simple typing December Health Days 2019 service to a service that aids the healthcare process in various ways. Initially medical transcription was a simple service that essentially converted the audio dictation of the patient- healthcare professional into text format.
With the advent of technology and the increase for standardized documentation mandated by law, medical transcription evolved into a service that helps in standardizing the healthcare process. There have been many changes in the way these services work; one of the most notable being services that are not restricted to the physical proximity of the healthcare professional or healthcare facility. This development has benefited both the transcription provider as well as the healthcare facility.
By moving away from the concept of an in-house transcription department to that of specialized outsourced services has provided many benefits to doctors/support staff/clinics/hospitals, some of which are given below:
Allowing for increased focus on provision of quality care: Healthcare facilities can increase the focus of their time, efforts and capital towards the process of providing quality care.
Substantial saving on costs, both direct and indirect: Helps save on direct and indirect costs that would have been incurred by having this activity in-house. Moreover outsourcing essentially converts the fixed cost of transcription to variable costs
Benefit from the experience and expertise of the vendor:Creating patient medical records is a specialized skill which requires the culmination of the right team, the right process and the right technology to provide optimum results. Outsourcing to an experienced vendor ensures that all the needs of the healthcare professionals are anticipated and solutions are customized to suit their needs.
Increased adaptability to changing statutory requirements for documenting: The very nature of healthcare services, mandates certain regulations regarding the norms for documentation, like adopting electronic health records; outsourced services help doctors/ nurses/ support staff St Vincent Medical Center Indianapolis retain their preferred method of dictation- transcription while still enabling information to be transferred to EMR via HL7 interface. Factors like ensuring HIPAA/ HITECH compliance as mandated by law during the process of transcription are also provided for by the vendor
Access to a bigger and better workforce: This provides doctors/support staff/clinics/hospitals access to a large pool of skilled and trained transcriptionists. Not only that they also have access to the supervisory, the technical and managerial workforce of the service provider
Enhance patient safety by creating legible records:The process of medical transcription ensures that patient medical records are created by documentation experts who put each transcript through multiple level quality checks. This ensures that patient medical records are accurate and legible.
Improve workflow:Seeking the services of a professional vendor ensures a smooth flow for collection of dictation, transmission for transcription and document delivery via the modes specified by the healthcare professional. Having quality information available on a timely basis through easy access modes enables a smoother workflow. Finding older transcripts is also easier due to the archive facilities provided by the outsourced medical transcription service provider, which enables easy searching using various criteria.
Helping the healthcare process by providing timely information: Outsourced service providers ensure that patient medical records are made available to the healthcare professionals within the turnaround time specified by them.
It can be seen that outsourcing medical transcription can provide healthcare facilities with services that enable them to standardize their services, by providing accurate, timely, secure and cost-effective transcripts.