Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Medical transcription: A valuable link in the healthcare chain

The healthcare process is complex one depending on inputs from various sources to be effective and economical. Medical transcription has always played an important part in the delivery of healthcare by creating patient records from the audio records of the patient- healthcare professional encounter.

The importance of medical transcription as a link in the process of delivering quality healthcare can be understood by studying in detail, the information captured in patient records. Patient records contain the following:

  • The patient demographic sheet or hospital admission sheet:
This includes details like

1.     Patient's address
2.     Next of kin
3.     Birthplace
4.     Social security number
5.     Occupation
6.     Sex
7.     Marital status
8.     Ethnic origin
9.     Religious preference
10. Admitting diagnosis
11. Financial entries including:

a)                 Patient's employee
b)                 Job title
c)                 Address of company
d)                 Insurance company
e)                 Contact person for emergency
f)                   Type of coverage
g)                 Insurance Identification number
h)                 Type of payment plan.

  • Consent forms Include:

a)     Patient's consent for treatment
b)     Outline of patient's responsibilities including billing
c)      Assurance that confidentiality will be protected

  • Medical entries of the patient's healthcare records include:
a)     Physician's notes
b)     Diagnostic tests
c)     Nursing entries
d)     Physician entries
e)     Therapists entries
f)       Ancillary personnel entries

  • Emergency records include:
a)     Demographic details
b)     Nursing assessment
c)     Physician's evaluation
d)     Treatment
e)     Conclusions

The role that medical transcription plays in the process of healthcare is vital as medical transcription is the process of creating comprehensive records that include:

  1. Diagnostic test results
  2. Consent
  3. Instructions

The role of medical transcription is that of recording the symptoms, the diagnosis, the treatment process and the progress made by the patient. This helps healthcare professionals in providing quality healthcare and also helps in the process of coding and billing. An easy fix to ensure that medical transcription takes place in a speedy, accurate, cost-effective manner and secure manner is to outsource the process of medical record creation to a professional medical transcription service provider.

Some of the advantages of outsourcing medical transcription are:

  • Increase in productivity: Outsourcing medical transcription has the advantage of increasing productivity of healthcare professionals and other staff in the healthcare facilities by providing services with several time saving benefits like:

1.      Retaining familiar modes of dictation
2.      Automatic uploads and downloads
3.      Providing multiple options for document delivery
4.      Archives to enable tracing transcripts
5.      HL7 interface for EMR adoption

  • Decrease in costs: Outsourcing medical transcription benefits the healthcare facilities by providing enormous savings on costs; both direct and indirect

  • Streamlined process: Outsourcing medical transcription ensures that the process of patient medical record creation occurs on a regular basis, ensuring both accuracy and turnaround time and in formats/templates required by the healthcare facilities/ healthcare professionals.

Healthcare facilities benefit by the administrative expertise, the technological expertise and the best practices of the medical transcription service provider.

TransDyne, a leader in the outsourced medical transcription industry has been providing comprehensive medical transcription services for over a decade. 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!               

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

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