Friday, October 21, 2011

Medical transcription outsourcing: What are the criteria to look for?

The current scenario in today’s healthcare documentation sector calls for healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities to move towards an electronic healthcare system. The key to making this happen is to ensure that healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities have an adequate support system in terms of technology and the right personnel to ensure smooth transition with minimum disruption to normal work flows.

Medical transcription has been supporting healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities in documenting the patient encounter in a manner that is conducive to the operations of healthcare facility and with minimum disruptions to the workflow of healthcare professionals. Medical transcription supports dictation as a means of data collection; this means that the healthcare professionals can dictate using their choice of dictation equipment and have the benefit of patient medical records that include the narrative portion. However with the changing needs of the current scenario it is important to partner with a medical transcription company that only supports current needs but also has the ability to support future requirements.

To ensure a long-term partnership with the medical transcription company it is important to evaluate the medical transcription company on the following criteria:

Price: The requirement for creation of patient medical records is a continuous one. Hence it is important to ensure that the pricing of the services provided helps save on current cost of transcription and does not affect the bottom line adversely. It is important to choose a medical transcription company that can provide quality services at reasonable rates. It is also important to ensure that there are no hidden charges in the pricing method used.

Functionality: There are numerous purposes for creating patient medical records like providing quality care, risk management support, coding & billing for reimbursement etc. It is important to evaluate the ability of the medical transcription company to provide transcription services that meet all these criteria by ensuring the functionality of the services. In this instance functionality of medical transcription services can be defined by accuracy and turnaround time.

Usability of services: Apart from pricing, accuracy and turnaround time one of the factors that have the most impact is the usability of these services. Considering the hectic life of healthcare professionals it is important that the technology used by the medical transcription company should be easy to use while still providing maximum benefits. Apart from features like offering options for modes of dictation and document delivery, the medical transcription company should also facilitate adoption of EMR/ EHR with options like discrete reportable transcription, structured dictation, structured transcription and HL7 interface.

Continuous support: While outsourcing medical transcription it is important to ascertain that the medical transcription company is in a position to provide continuous support not only in terms of volume of transcription, weekend & holiday transcription, but also round the clock customer support, editing services for speech recognition software etc.

Training required for transition: While outsourcing medical transcription it is important to ascertain that the use of these services does not require lengthy training and orientation, considering the hectic life of healthcare professionals and the criticality of services provided by them.

It can be concluded that evaluating the medical transcription company on stringent criteria ensures that both current and future needs of the healthcare facility with regard to transcription are taken care of.

TransDyne, a leader in the outsourced medical transcription industry has used their extensive background in information technology and their experience in serving the needs of the healthcare sector to provide affordable and integrated medical transcription solutions.

Among the software and tools offered by TransDyne for transcription, the smart delivery system has a large role to play in easing the path to EMR/EHR adoption The Smart Delivery system, which has features like User defined folder paths to enable easy imports to EMR systems is the suggested mode of document delivery where pre-defined file saving would help import documents to EMR systems.  Apart from this TransDyne also offers discounted rates for those healthcare facilities that provide demographic data entered in the EMR rather than through other modes.

Along with medical transcription services involving multiple level quality checks to ensure accuracy, the use of the right technology for ease of use, turnaround time and security, at reasonable rates, TransDyne also provides discrete reportable transcription for adoption of EMR/ EHR 

To avail complete medical transcription services from TransDyne, click here.

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