Medical Transcription Outsourcing - Benefit From The Best Practices Of The Service Provider

The practice of medicine requires expert inputs to meet the high standards of quality care and profitability. Keeping in mind that healthcare is a specialized skill requiring intense focus and concentration to produce the desired results it is important for both healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities to focus on the core business of providing quality healthcare and outsource all support activities.

Outsourcing all activities other than the core process of providing healthcare not only endows numerous benefits like reduction in costs, renewed focus of efforts and resources on the core business, but also ensures that the healthcare facility can benefit from the expertise and best practices established by the service provider.

Medical transcription is one such activity that plays an important part in the healthcare process by creating patient medical records, converting the audio dictation of the patient- healthcare professional encounter into text. Though the information in patient medical records is vital to the smooth running of healthcare facilities; contributing to the process of providing care, providing the basis of coding and billing and providing an important support in risk management, this is not part of the core activities of the healthcare facility.

The best solution available to healthcare facilities to avail accurate, timely, secure and cost effective services is to outsource their patient medical record creation needs to a professional medical transcription service provider. Outsourcing ensures that the healthcare facility can benefit by the best practices established by the vendor.

What are best practices in medical transcription that can benefit healthcare facilities?

Best practices have been defined as a method, process, activity that is believed to be more effective at delivering a desired outcome than any other technique, method, process etc when applied to a particular condition or circumstance.

In the context of outsourced transcription services, best practices can be defined as those process that produce the desired outcome, namely:

Accuracy: One of the main quality criteria that this service needs to meet is the accuracy of the information transcribed. Best practices have a role to play in this regard. The accuracy would be affected by:

- The skill of the transcriptionists: The service provider would have best practices with regard to recruiting the best talent and for training policies to ensure expert transcription

- Quality check methods: Due to various factors like distorted audio, the style of dictation, the specialty and the skill level of the transcriptionists, it is important for transcription vendors to have best practices in place that ensure that more than one set of skilled “ears and eyes” are involved in the process of quality assurance.

Speed: Apart from the accuracy, the other most important quality factor is turnaround time. It is important for doctors/support staff/clinics/hospitals to have patient medical records available to them within specific time periods. Best practices towards maintaining tight turnaround time would involve having:

- A huge pool of skilled and trained transcriptionists in different specialties to ensure quick turnaround time without compromising on accuracy

- The right technology to ensure speedy and secure delivery of audio for transcription and convenient modes for document delivery

Convenient: Best practices with regard to convenient options could extend to:

- Helping retain familiar modes of dictation enabling healthcare professionals to optimize their limited time
- Options for document delivery as per the need of the healthcare professional

Secure: The best practices regarding the HIPAA/ HITECH compliance during the medical transcription process would include:

- Secure technology
- Secure processes including 100% in-house transcription
- Secure infrastructure

Flexible: Best practices with regard to flexibility would include volume flexibility, flexibility with regard to turnaround time and other factors like weekend and holiday transcription etc.

Economical: The best practices of the medical transcription service provider in this regard would be billing methods as per AHDC norms, limiting cost to cost per line of transcription, elimination of fixed costs, no hidden costs and conversion of fixed costs of transcription to variable costs.