Healthcare is one of the largest industries around the world. It includes healthcare organizations, research centers, service, and product providers, etc. These organizations generate a large volume of clinical data daily, such as clinical documentation of patient records, patient encounters, and administrative documents. Various advanced tools and software like voice recognition systems are available to dictate clinical documentation. These systems come with their limitations, such as accuracy. Thus, a human touch is required to ensure accurate medical documents. Medical transcription services are helpful when it comes to maintaining precise and accurate health records. The article discusses the medical transcription concept, medical transcription services, and their essential characteristics.
What is Medical Transcription?
Medical transcription is a legal and permanent document stating medical investigation, facilitating communication, and supporting medical insurance claims. It involves three primary processes:
- Signing up hospitals. Training doctors for the process and storing details in the server.
- Digitize sound and send it to the offshore outsourcing service center. Convert digitized data back to sound. Listen to the dictation and transcription by the trained transcriptionists.
- Send transcribed files to quality control professionals. Corrections if needed and then transmit back word file.
Medical Transcription Services:
Healthcare organizations can outsource medical transcription services to ensure the accuracy and speed of the data transcription. It simply needs to upload audio files and receive written health records. These services are more accurate compared to speech recognition software. They have a wide range of features such as proofreading, quality assurance, entering data into the appropriate systems, and so on. Choosing a medical transcription service for the organization is difficult as it needs sensitive information shared with a third party. Therefore, one should look for three essential characteristics of a medical transcription firm before choosing a transcription partner.
- Confidentiality: Medical transcription firms must ensure confidentiality of the data shared with them. Clinical data includes patients’ personal and critical health information, sensitive research information, pharmaceutical records, treatment tracks and records, and other sensitive information that must be kept safe and private. Innovative encryption platforms are available to provide maximum security. The information should be accessible only to authorized transcription to avoid spreading and misusing the data. Also, servers should be protected with firewalls and antivirus software.
While dealing with confidential medical information, all the highest ethical and privacy standards should be followed. Medical transcription firms should ensure the following standards in their services:
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 has rules while dealing with confidential medical information.
- Regulations incorporated while sharing and accessing confidential medical information
Thus, apart from accurate and timely medical transcriptions, medical transcriptionists must maintain the privacy and secrecy of the information from unauthorized people.
- Areas of Expertise: Medical transcription firms have different areas of expertise to ensure they meet all the order criteria. These experts include legal, business, marketing, academic, podcasts, social media, interviews, and media transcriptions. Apart from expertise, a specialty of medical transcription services should be considered before choosing a service provider. Various areas of expertise in medical transcription services include
- Allergy immunology
- Cardiology reports and transcriptions
- Adolescent and paediatric medicine
- Anaesthesiology reports
- Clinical notes and summary
- Chart notes
- Dental report and transcription
- Doctor note transcription
- Emergency room
- Endocrinology
- Electrophysiology reports
- Family practice
- Group practice work records and reports
- Infectious disease reports
- Patient notes
- Progress notes
Moreover, there are no limitations to the medical transcription requirements as it is a vast field with enormous exceptional cases, studies, research, and developments. Therefore, it is one of the essential characteristics of a medical transcription firm while providing services to medical organizations and hospitals.
- Quality Control: Medical reports include difficult words that may lead to erroneously written scripts. Thus, proofreading is a crucial aspect of medical transcription firms. Therefore, it is vital to ensure the transcription is produced by a native speaker having a good command of the field. An excellent quality transcription needs multiple accuracy checks of the document by a quality analyst.
Medical Billing Services:
Medical billing service providers support healthcare organizations with complete freedom to docs on patient care, cut down costs, and reduce errors while maintaining and managing back-office tasks, medical billing, cash flow, and other tasks not needing human assistance. Outsourcing medical billing services allow healthcare organizations to be efficient, effective, and productive. Various medical billing services are available that include
- Pre-certification and insurance verification
- Patient demographic entry
- Account receivables follow-up
- ICD-10 and CPT coding
- Payment posting
- Charge entry
- Claims submission
- Denial management
Healthcare organizations undergo complicated processes and operations every day. It is challenging to keep track and record each task. Still, medical billing services can simplify, automate, and scale various administrative tasks allowing healthcare providers to focus on important clinical work.
