The Importance of Medical Transcription in Treating Patients
The process of manually transcribing voice reports from health professionals and converting it into text reports is medical transcription. These reports are important because they help to create a patient’s medical history. Specialists and support staff use these medical reports as a guide when treating their patients. Medical records are also required to bill insurance companies. The billing and coding staff use this to create claims and ask for reimbursements. It is also mandatory by law to maintain a record of every patient visit to any health professional. Medical transcription was originally done by in-house transcriptionists but outsourcing began when they realized its cost effectiveness.
Benefits of Outsourcing Medical Transcription
When hospitals began outsourcing medical transcription, they made huge savings in the cost per line as well as the cost of employing direct labor. Outsourcing ensured they no longer needed to employ HR and training staff to take care of the needs of the transcriptionists. They were able to tap the skills of the vast college educated workforce in countries such as India where English was the chief medium of communication. The workforce here was also exposed to the American accent and Americanisms thanks to multiple TV channels. After a short period of training, service providers in these places were able to provide health professionals in the USA with accurate medical records.
Increased Efficiency of Healthcare Sectors with Outsourcing
The decision to outsource medical transcription resulted in the ability to leverage time zone differences. The voice reports uploaded at the end of a working day were available to the doctors the next working day due to efficient turnaround times. To ensure continued accuracy in reports, medical transcription service providers also followed strict QA procedures such as editing, proof reading, and a final review of the completed records. Healthcare companies were no longer affected by employee turnover in the transcription field as the service providers catered to their transcription demands. Medical records were also securely stored by the service providers on their servers and accessible to users by means of passwords only. This ensured patient confidentiality while at the same time ensuring medical records of the patient were available round the clock to all providers.