Medical transcription: Choosing the right service provider

Medical transcription has become an integral part of the healthcare process, aiding in the process of record creation. Essentially medical transcription is an effective back end support for healthcare facilities. Though medical transcription is an integral part of the healthcare process, it is not part of the core business of the healthcare facility. The easy fix to ensure creation of patient records in a cost–effective, accurate, speedy and secure way is to outsource the entire process to a professional medical transcription service provider.

Choosing the right medical transcription service provider is vital as it is a partnership that will have long-term impact on the running of the healthcare facility. Choosing a medical transcription service provider is business decision that requires a process of qualification and evaluation to ensure that a working partnership is formed. To this end, a healthcare facility has to consider numerous factors while outsourcing medical transcription

What are the factors to be considered while outsourcing medical transcription?

The process of choosing the right medical transcription service provider should logically follow a process involving two phases.

First phase of the outsourcing decision:

Purpose of outsourcing: This part of the process is probably one of the most ignored and important steps in the outsourcing process. This step requires the healthcare facility to clearly define what it hopes to gain from the outsourcing process. Typically this could include:

1. Streamlining the transcription flow: Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that the process of converting dictation files into patient records happens as a matter of course
2. Reducing the turnaround time: Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that the turnaround time required by the healthcare professional is met with
3. Lowering costs: Outsourcing medical transcription helps the healthcare facility save on costs of medical transcription as well as other associated costs
4. Better focus on core business: Outsourcing medical transcription has the additional benefit of allowing the healthcare facility to concentrate on the core business of providing quality healthcare profitably
5. Having a leaner organizational structure: Outsourcing medical transcription helps the organization structure leaner by ensuring that along with the need for medical transcriptionists, other staff like managers, administrators and IT staff is reduced
6. Quickening the receivables process: Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that records are created on time, thus helping to accelerate the first stage of the receivables cycle

Deliverables expected from the outsourcing process: This stage could involve defining the exact parameters to measure the outcome of outsourcing medical transcription:

1. Acceptable accuracy levels: This is perhaps the most crucial factor, as the information captured by the medical transcriptionist plays an important role in continued patient care
2. Turnaround time for both regular reports and STAT files: Turnaround time is very important as the information should not only be accurate but also timely
3. Total security of confidential patient information: Maintaining the confidentiality of patient data at every stage is mandatory for healthcare facilities. While outsourcing medical transcription due consideration needs to be given to this factor

Factoring future requirements: This essentially means that the healthcare facility has to include the transcription requirements that may arise from the future expansion plans of the healthcare facility, including:

1. Adding new specialties: Adding on new specialties would require that the medical transcription service provider should be in a position to provide transcription services for the new specialties without compromising the accuracy or turnaround time
2. Opening of new branches: Expansion plans of the healthcare facility would have an impact on the transcription capacity of the medical transcription service provider
3. Adoption of EMR: It is important to ascertain that the medical transcription service provider has capabilities to integrate information with EMR/EHR in the form of HL7 messages

Second phase of the outsourcing decision:

Sourcing medical transcription service providers: This has become easy considering that information is only a click away. However it is important to look for more than the price offered for services

Receiving proposals: This stage would involve sorting through the proposals received to look for qualifying features like experience of the service provider, HIPAA/HITECH compliance, technology used and the type of team available to execute the work

Evaluating medical transcription service providers: This stage of the process would involve evaluating the medical transcription service provider on the basis of criteria like accuracy, turnaround time, price and security.

Verifying the credentials: This part of the process involves two steps-

1. Verifying references: This would mean following-up on the testimonials of customers who have availed similar services
2. Availing free trial: Availing a free trial of services ensures that the medical transcription service provider is able to deliver services as promised

Signing the contract: This is the final step in the outsourcing process involving defining in black and white what the role of each party is in the outsourcing process.

Outsourcing the medical transcription requirements is essentially like choosing a long-term partner and needs to be done with a great deal of care.

TransDyne offers quality medical transcription at reasonable prices, done by expert medical transcriptionists with a very quick turnaround time executed through secure HIPAA and HITECH compliant channels, with very high levels of accuracy and all this with technology that is advanced but easy to use!

For more details about the advantages of a long-term partnership with TransDyne, click here.