Thursday, January 26, 2012

Medical transcription outsourcing: Playing a role in Data Governance

The process of quality healthcare is heavily dependent on data to function effectively. Not only does the actual process of healthcare depend on data, but also the successful running of the healthcare facility depends on data for commercial and operational purposes. Considering the importance of data or information in all aspects of healthcare, it is important for healthcare facilities to focus on improving the process of managing information.

Medical transcription is one of the functions that contribute in the process of creating information by creating patient medical records from the audio dictation of the healthcare professionals regarding patient encounters. As medical transcription requires resources like the right team, the right process and right technology to meet all the quality criteria and still remain cost effective, outsourcing medical transcription has been found to be the right solution.

Outsourcing medical transcription has many advantages like accuracy, turnaround time, security, easy to use technology and lower prices. Another aspect that outsourced medical transcription services aid is in the process of Data Governance.

What is data governance and how do outsourced medical transcription services aid in this process?

Data Governance is a quality control discipline for assessing, managing, using, improving, maintaining and protecting organizational information.

Some of the goals of Data Governance are:

• Increasing consistency and confidence in decision making
• Decreasing the risk of regulatory fines
• Improving data security
• Maximizing the income generation potential of data
• Designating accountability for information quality
• Enable better planning
• Minimizing or eliminating rework
• Optimize staff effectiveness
• Establish process performance baseline to enable improvement efforts
• Acknowledge and hold all gains

These goals of data governance are used to improve:

• Accuracy
• Accessibility
• Consistency
• Completeness

Admittedly the contribution of medical transcription in the data governance process is not very big but it is definitely significant considering they share some of the same goals.

To see how medical transcription contributes to the data governance process let us examine the goals of data governance and how the goals of quality medical transcription services are in tune with them:

• Increasing consistency and confidence in decision-making: Medical transcription is the process of creating patient medical records maintaining the quality standards of accuracy and speed. Ensuring accuracy and turnaround time help the healthcare professionals in making decisions regarding the care provided to patients.

• Decreasing the risk of regulatory fines: Maintaining patient medical records for a certain period of time is a statutory requirement. Outsourced medical transcription service providers contribute in this aspect too.

• Improving data security: Outsourced medical transcription service providers are aware of the need to maintain HIPAA compliance and endeavor to do so during every stage of the medical transcription process

• Maximizing the income generation potential of data: Patient medical records provide the base information for coding and billing. By creating complete and accurate patient medical records outsourced medical transcription service providers help in the reimbursement process.

• Designating accountability for information quality: Outsourced medical transcription service providers have Quality Guidelines in place for quality assurance which not only ensures quality of patient medical records but is also used as means of educating the healthcare professionals and the medical transcriptionist team in improving quality

• Enable better planning: Having the information regarding patient encounters help both healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities in planning

• Minimizing or eliminating rework: Outsourced medical transcription service providers ensure that when duplicate patient medical records are needed to be provided to more than one healthcare professional, this is done automatically. They also ensure that healthcare professionals and support staff do not need to duplicate efforts regarding creation of patient medical records

• Optimize staff effectiveness: Outsourced medical transcription service providers not only benefit the working life of healthcare professionals, but also provide benefits to information technology, administrative and managerial staff allowing them focus effectively on their core business

It can be seen that outsourcing medical transcription to a professional and technologically savvy medical transcription service provider can help in the Data Governance process.

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 total medical transcription solutions with an inherent understanding of the working life of healthcare professionals and the operations of healthcare facilities. The medical transcription solutions provided by TransDyne help in the data governance process.

TransDyne offers quality medical transcription at reasonable prices, executed by experienced and qualified 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 complete medical transcription services from TransDyne, click here.

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