Doctors know best the difficulties that come with their job. But it doesn’t take a medical specialist to understand what it takes to diagnose a disease, conduct tests, and recommend treatment. In this tiresome process, a specialist must speak to a patient, gather data and then sort out everything to capture what’s essential only. The need to do this every time highlights the vital role of medical transcription services to healthcare providers.
Medical transcription eases the doctor’s job by drawing facts from a health-related voice recording as narrated by patients or dictated by the nurse or doctor. Medical reports could be voice files, jotted-down notes during a diagnosis or seminar, or any other uttered audio material. They can also be spoken over a smartphone or uploaded to the web via apps.
Since time immemorial, transcription has helped health and wellness professionals extract, manage and store data deemed useful for research and treatment purposes. In 2019 alone, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted an impressive 58,500 healthcare transcription jobs, not inclusive of the freelancing jobs posted online.
From reducing worker burnout to availing the most important data when needed, transcribing medical data has lots of benefits, as we shall see. Still, practitioners need expert transcribers to handle their data.
This article will discuss the critical role of the service in your medical practice and how to spot and hire the right vendor for your needs.
The Far-reaching Pros of Medical Transcription Services
Transcribing voice files offer a trove of benefits to care providers and the industry as a whole. Besides freeing practitioners from the daunting task of revisiting files to sort and extract vital data, they also ensure data availability and, most importantly, information correctness for proper medical use.
Below are some reasons to consider transcription in your workplace::
1. Reduces worker burnout
Worker burnout is a bone of contention in the healthcare sector. It happens when doctors or nurses overwork themselves to health-threatening levels while in the line of duty.
OSHA warns that worker fatigue can cause increased stress, bad eating behavior, lack of exercise, and disease.
In the worst cases, it causes medical mistakes or injury to the healthcare expert. Other times, it leads to an endless stress cycle; plus a negative workplace attitude, which further impacts productivity. In data management, burnout can cause grave mistakes and result in wrong conclusions or severe health consequences.
After a long day of grueling conversations with patients and lots of work here and there, your employee is naturally too tired to handle any data work, even those that involve audio content. Because you hire them to preserve and protect lives, it makes more sense to free them of extra duties like demystifying complex data.
Search, vet, and hire expert medical transcription services to guarantee timely and accurate data to your dedicated team of practitioners.
2. Ensures Data Accuracy and Consistency
Data accuracy matters a lot in medicine, further highlighting the need to have a professional tackle your transcription.
Wrongly transcribed data can hamper the quality of healthcare and ruin the patient experience. Incomplete, inaccurate, or inconsistent info can also compromise or slow down a doctor’s intervention, yet medical problems require timely intervention.
One of Electronic Health Records’ goals is to ensure caregivers keep consistent, accurate patient information for quick and correct responses during emergencies. As hinted earlier, it’s better to outsource this task to dedicated professionals than forcing your team to handle everything and risk ending with compromised data.
3. Guarantees Compliance to Insurance Cover Requirements
Another crucial reason to consider healthcare transcription is to ensure your records adhere to insurance firm needs. One policy dictates that the insurance provider is not responsible for any healthcare fees unless a practitioner shows the doctor-patient conversations’ written docs.
Remember, your patients count on you to provide these crucial documents when the time comes to summon their insurance providers. Failure to do so because of poor data management can discourage a patient while painting a gloomy picture of your practice.
Hence, outsourcing these duties to a reputable transcription service guarantees data availability and access in desperate and time-bound situations.
4. Maintains Patient Confidence
Service providers that use an internal transcribe may unknowingly make patients uncomfortable. The expert must often sit in the diagnosis room as the customer talks confidential and delicate healthcare data.
Using a virtual transcriber or recording the audio and sorting out vital information can guarantee patient confidence and comfort during doctor interviews and personalize your healthcare experience.
Besides patient comfort, this privacy level reduces distraction allowing the expert to give their patients full attention when gathering crucial diagnosis info.
In the spirit of confidentiality, the best transcribers are HIPAA compliant. This Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 requires that care providers maintain total patient confidentiality in their services.
5. Save time & cuts spending
Most doctors are usually overbooked. Therefore, letting medical transcription services handle the paperwork can ensure physicians plenty of time treating the sick.
Freeing experts of these extra duties while opting for affordable transcription services reduces office-related spending saving significant money for your practice.
Overall, transcription increases productivity by availing data when needed and reducing data wait times. This further enhances the quality of treatment and cuts the spending related to patient care.
6. It saves more lives and builds your reputation.
Because accurate info is essential in the correct diagnosis and treatment of patients, you’ll likely save more lives by focusing on data access and accuracy.
Professional medical transcribers understand the vital role of straight-to-the-point info that guarantees helpful interventions in life-threatening situations. Hence, being there for your clients during desperate times has the extra benefit of portraying your firm as an empathetic and expert care provider.
All these perks matter in attracting more clients in an era of healthcare consumerization where patient experiences and personalization rule the business front.
With all these benefits and more, you’re probably considering hiring medical transcription services to handle your data management moving forward.
Tips to Choose Competent Medical Transcription Services
Having understood the vital role of transcription in medical practice, it’s paramount to investigate quality and accuracy when hiring. Because an in-house team may compromise patient confidence and confidentiality, optimizing your transcription comes down to the vendor you choose to work with.
What is their transcription process? While some use software transcription, others rely on human capabilities to guarantee 99 percent accuracy.
Does the service follow a multistep process? You want a service that takes your project through multiple editing phases to confirm data accuracy.
It’s also mandatory to check if the service specializes in healthcare transcriptions because this segment demands some expertise and years of experience. Remember, you’re handling health data that will determine medical success or failure hence the keen eye for accuracy.
These are some of the considerations when vetting a transcriber for your medical service. Discover more below;
The 7 Factors to Consider When Hiring a Transcriptionist
1. How much for the services?
The cost of medical transcription services varies by provider and the quality you request. Some companies use a per-minute approach, which is costly and poses difficulties when auditing the final product’s accuracy versus the stipulated charges.
Most medical transcription services use the standard 65 visible black characters (VBC) line approach. This strategy dictates that most viewers can access it if the eye can see a letter in black ink.
In essence, any rating that stands at 55 VBC will cost the same as the 65 VBC rate. This is the most recognized strategy in transcription pricing.
When analyzing pricing, be sure to pay only for the services you need. Some transcribers will charge a hire fee extra perks like a quick turnaround.
2. What’s their document handling process?
Top-rated transcribers power online editing capabilities and digital processes like e-signatures. Physicians can view, edit and add signatures to documents without the need to print.
While vetting for the right vendor, be sure to double-check hidden fees. Moreover, ask if the mentioned price covers all the services you need to get an accurate final product. Also, inquire if the service allows free storage, backup, and security for all shared files.
3. Do they prioritize correctness & confidentiality?
According to HIPAA, healthcare providers must meet specific security requirements when handling patient data.
Solutions like the Secure sockets layer (SSL) juggle a patient’s private info making it inaccessible to unrecognized users. This standard mandates service providers to implement no less than 128-bit encryption. Still, some vendors use more impenetrable encryptions. To get encryption, you need a proper SSL certificate from reputed certificate authorities like Comodo SSL certificate, GlobalSign SSL, Sectigo, RapidSSL, etc. You can still try out resellers who offer SSL certificates at very affordable cost. If you are unsure about the type of SSL your website needs then, you can ask SSL providers and they will suggest you a perfect SSL for your website.
Competent transcribers take your projects through multiple phases to ensure quality and data correctness.
4. How do they capture audio information?
You can capture dictation in many different ways. One long-used approach is the old-school phone approach, which does not require any additional hardware or software.
Alternatively, you can opt for the digital voice recorder where patients and physicians can dictate during sessions, but one has to upload everything to a PC and share.
Most service providers depend on mobile apps that work in both android and iOS. They capture as long as you have an internet connection. Other services allow you to use your tablet’s or PC’s microphone.
5. How do they deliver the final work?
Different service providers rely on various EHR integration levels to deliver the final product to clients.
While others copy-paste the data to a patient’s file, others use strategies that imports data into the electronic health records.
Most services offer varying levels of EHR integration. Others copy and paste the transcribed text into a patient’s electronic chart, while some import the data into the EHR.
Most services have an online account where customers can view all complete transcriptions.
6. What is their transcription process?
Not all transcribers specialize in medical transcription services. Because lives are at stake, this segment requires some expertise and years of experience.
Also, consider a service with EHR expertise to enjoy comprehensive services transcription and health records go together.
Ask how long the vendor will take to transcribe each project because medicine is a dynamic sector that demands quick turnaround times.
7. Check their contract terms.
Contract terms usually carry crucial service agreement data. Scrutinizing the words can help you spot potential pitfalls like hidden charges.
You also need quality assurance and some cushioning, e.g., a cashback guarantee if the service fails to deliver.
The Solution
While medical transcription services offer multiple benefits to a healthcare business, you want to work with the best to ensure data quality and access. Don’t rush to sign an agreement. Double-check contract terms to guarantee fairness.
Working with a professional transcriber from Bunny Studios ensures timely and accurate results.
