Whether an individual practice or hospital, group practice, acute care facility, outpatient clinic, rehabilitation center or nursing facility, you should outsource medical transcription to minimize your workload. It is difficult to manage both patient care and clinical documentation simultaneously. You wouldn’t be able to do full justice to either of the tasks. Owing to tedious and monotonous nature of the task, errors are likely to occur in transcription and this could prove very costly to you. When you outsource, you have more time to devote to patients care, while having the assurance that your medical documentation is being handled professionally.
How the Medical Transcription Company Reduces your Workload • No Need to Manage Software or Training – You don’t have to worry about recruiting new people for the job, or about providing them with the necessary training and software. You also don’t have to worry about what to do if one or more of your employees are on leave, thereby causing to a backlog issue. • No HIPAA compliance worries – The responsibility of ensuring HIPAA compliance for transcription would rest with the service provider. Monitoring would be done at intervals to ensure that all guidelines are adhered to. • Quality Audits to Ensure Accuracy – Your service provider would take care of this. The general strategy is a three-tiered process involving editors, medical editors and proof readers. • Updating and Archiving – The services provided by the professional outsourcing company would make it easier and less time-consuming for you to manage and retrieve medical documents. Other Benefits
Using outsourced medical transcription services assures many other gains: • Experience and expertise for multiple specialties • Experience and skill to cover a wide variety of medical records • HL7 interface • Electronic/digital signature facility • Web-based review and editing enabled • Different dictation and file transfer methods to choose from • Choice of having transcription done within the US or performed by low-cost manpower in offshore countries such as India or the Philippines • As far as possible, all your projects would be handled by the same team of transcriptionists • Work reports delivered with the desired frequency • Feeds for EPM or EHR • Billing based on 65 character line • No fees for underlining, bolding, headers or footers • Cost savings of up to 40 percent • Reduced backlog • Convenient turnaround • Free Trial All these factors prove that outsourcing medical transcription can indeed minimize your workload and give you a host of other benefits as well.
Read on to know what to expect from a professional medical transcription company apart from a long and rewarding business relationship. It is well-known that outsourcing is more advantageous than performing the task in-house. It saves time, effort and energy which can be used for the actual profit generating core business processes of your healthcare practice. It can also help you avoid a backlog situation and contribute to effective risk management.
Benefits the Expert Medical Transcription Service Provider Would Offer
These are the benefits you can expect from your expert service provider:
• Flexibility – Flexibility is necessary for a client to want to use the solutions of a particular service provider. Providers of transcription solutions for the healthcare industry offer flexibility in different areas:
• Dictation Options – The common choices offered are toll-free number and digital dictation machines.
• File Transfer – The options for this are browser-based transfer with secure 256 bit AES encryption and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
• Turnaround – The turnaround (within 24 hours) is usually favorable for projects of various volumes. You can specify what turnaround you expect.
• Custom Formatting – At the time of entrusting a project with the service provider, you just have to define the formatting specifications and guidelines to them. The transcription team would prepare the various medical reports accordingly.
• Versatility – A medical transcription company that has been in business for a fairly long time would be able to prepare a wide variety of medical reports for all medical specialties. Their specialty experience includes allergy and sleep medicine, occupational therapy, nuclear medicine, microbiology, toxicology and radiation oncology.
• Quality Interactions – An established service provider would have friendly and quality customer service personnel. You can expect them to interact with you in a very professional manner whether you want to discuss a new project or have queries pertaining to handling of a technical glitch.
• Affordable Pricing – When you outsource medical transcription services, you don’t have to spend for staff, capital equipment, management, training, software, IT equipment, quality control and other in-house transcription aspects. In this way, you can expect 30 to 40 percent reduction in your operating outlay.
• Efficient Quality Control – A reliable medical transcription company typically adopts a protocol of three-tiered quality auditing. This quality auditing would be handled by medical and language editors, and proofreaders.
• Finished Reports are Easily Accessible – Technology advancements have made the downloading and monitoring of files a smooth and practically flawless process. With just the touch of a button(s), you would be able to locate your files, track their progress and even edit them online.
• Electronic Signature Facility – The electronic signature or E-signature is a computer-based signature with which a healthcare professional can sign a transcription that has been found to be accurate and approved. Two advantages of this E-signature are:
• It can be provided from anywhere where there is computer and internet access after the physician has signed in with his username and password.
• The physician does not have to physically pull out the document to sign it.
The Knowledge Gained Would Help You Choose Wisely
Now that you are aware of what to expect from a professional medical transcription services company, you would be better able to judge whether a particular company is suitable for your requirements or not. You just have to ask questions pertaining to the aspects described above and see if you get satisfactory answers. A reliable service provider would also offer you a free trial. This would be very beneficial in helping you assess the company’s competence, cost-effectiveness and dependability.
You can reduce costs of operation by outsourcing medical transcription. You know how important a procedure transcription is for the healthcare industry. Unfortunately, it is also a non-profit generating and tedious task that does get repetitive and boring. Whatever the specialty (ies) your practice focuses on, the kind of medical records you need to prepare, and your desired formatting, the services of an outsourcing company can actually limit a host of expenses associated with medical transcription. You would actually save by 30 to 40 per cent compared to when you get the task performed in-house.
How Outsourcing to a Reliable Medical Transcription Company Helps
Given below are the many ways by which assistance from an expert service provider can help you contain costs:
Information Technology – Outsourcing reduces the expenditure towards information technology. The healthcare outsourcing companies would be using the same IT infrastructure for a number of clients. So the costs for the same would be shared between these clients. If you were performing the transcription in-house, you would have to pay the entire expenses all by yourself.
Capital Expenditure – You don’t have to pay for capital equipment such as furniture and headsets for the purpose.
Utility Expenses – The outsourcing solutions provider would pay for electricity and other utility requirements for the back office job. You pay for the task performed.
Staff Related Expenses – You won’t have to recruit staff exclusively to perform medical transcription. If you don’t have to employ new staff, you also don’t have to worry about giving them salary, insurance benefits, extra payments for overtime and for working on holidays or weekends, tax payments and so on.
Management Resources – It is the service provider’s responsibility to keep management staff for the task and entrust them with duties such as staffing, training and work supervision. So you would be considerably relieved of expenses associated with these management processes.
No Indirect/Hidden Charges – The medical transcription service provider would charge you only per line. So you don’t have to worry about indirect charges or hidden expenses.
Real Estate – To perform the task in-house, you would need some space (real estate). This problem and the related expenses are totally done away with when you outsource.
Choose Right
To ensure that you are able to reduce costs of operation by outsourcing medical transcription, you should find yourself the right service provider. A suitable service provider:
• Is HIPAA compliant
• Has many years of experience and plenty of clients
• Has a superior quality auditing system
• Has an email address as well as a toll-free number for customer support
• Offers different dictation and file transfer options
• Offers you the option of domestic or offshore transcription
• Offers custom turnaround
• Offers a free trial
• Provides volume discounts
A reliable transcription services provider can work as a virtual extension to your office, ensuring dedicated support for medical transcription.
 Outsourced medical transcription benefits multi-specialty clinics in many ways. Multi-specialty clinics deal with various fields of medicine including emergency and trauma care. There is so much to do, so many patients to treat and so many physical conditions to handle. Healthcare professionals are burdened with tons and tons of work and through all their processes they have to ensure HIPAA compliance as well.
Transcription of the various kinds of data on hand would be next to impossible for the existing professionals of the healthcare facility to handle efficiently. It would compromise efficiency of the core processes. So the multi-specialty clinic will have to devote extra resources and maintain a department exclusively for medical transcription. This would increase the operating costs for the facility. Medical transcription outsourcing would ensure efficient and cost-effective handling of the comprehensive data transcription tasks in any healthcare center.
Cost Savings and Increased Efficiency
Healthcare centers could reportedly save up to 40% of costs through medical transcription outsourcing. The medical transcription company caters to large and small healthcare centers including hospitals, multi-specialty clinics, emergency and trauma care centers, and individual practices. A reliable medical transcription service provider has vast experience in handling transcription requirements of these clients. Medical transcription is provided for all medical specialties. Individual teams of transcriptionists are assigned for particular fields to ensure greater efficiency in the medical transcription.
User-friendly Medical Transcription Services
Client needs are given paramount importance by medical transcription companies. This ensures better integration of the medical transcription service into the system of the healthcare center as well as more user-friendliness. The service provider offers many options so that the client can select the most appropriate scheme. For dictating the files, the transcription company offers the option of telephonic dictation through the transcription company’s toll-free number or digital dictation with the digital recorders provided by the company. Varied EMR requirements are also accommodated.
Seamless Integration of Medical Transcription into the Clinic’s Functioning
The medical transcription service provider ensures total HIPAA compliance, which ensures great peace of mind for the healthcare center. There is an overall user-friendliness in the entire medical transcription system. This is evident in the interface, the document flow management system, the file transfer protocol (FTP), the file auto sending, and other aspects. These user-friendly options ensure effortless integration of the medical transcription services into the system and smooth functioning of the multi-specialty clinic. This is quite an important factor if the medical transcription outsourcing should increase efficiency of the healthcare center’s functioning and ease the burden of its professionals.
Cost-effectiveness Ensured with Medical Transcription Services
Cost-effectiveness is one of the most important factors when it comes to medical transcription. The price scheme is determined by various factors such as the type of dictation, the turnaround time demanded, the amount of data to be transcribed and document flow management requirements. But a reliable and efficient medical transcription company will ensure cost-effectiveness for the client. This is how medical transcription benefits multi-specialty clinics.
 Whether it is for cardiology, gastroenterology, surgery, allergy and sleep medicine or any other specialty, accuracy and confidentiality should be maintained in medical transcription. The kind of precision you should be aiming for, whether you perform the task in-house or outsource it, is 99 %. The commitment to privacy and security is in keeping with medical ethics and HIPAA guidelines.
Why Medical Transcription Services Should be Precise, Private and Secure
It is not worth using the services of a particular service provider if you always find errors in the transcripts. Precision is important to ensure that the patient receives the right medical care. The patient’s file would be passed around among various healthcare professionals as a reference of the patient’s medical history, allergies and other vital information. Even a small error in this information could result in faulty treatment/continuing care and sometimes even death. Secondly, an error-free medical record is an important documentation resource that can save a physician when he faces a case of medical malpractice. An accurate medical record also helps to ensure that a physician promptly gets paid for his services by the concerned insurance carriers.
Coming to confidentiality, the leak of Patient Health Information (PHI), whether knowingly or unknowingly, is a serious matter for which legal action would be imposed. The HIPAA Act calls for protection of all individually identifiable patient information such as name, birth date, address and Social Security Number. This information must be protected whether transmitted in paper mode, electronically or orally.
Measures Adopted
Medical transcription outsourcing companies adopt effective strategies to ensure that precision and confidentiality are never compromised. Some of these measures are outlined below.
For Accuracy
• Employment of personnel who are fluent in English
• Providing training to these personnel in medical terminology and etymology, diseases, human anatomy, laboratory procedures and other relevant topics
• Providing training in the English language including spelling, punctuation, grammar and style
• Developing their research skills to search for medical words and drug names
• A three tiered process of quality control with contributions from editors and proofreaders
• Flagging wherever there is a doubt instead of typing the wrong word (s)
For Confidentiality
Computers are secured with passwords and up-to-date anti-virus software and firewalls. Employees are made to sign documents pertaining to privacy and non-disclosure; employees are searched when they enter and before they leave the office premises. Random checks are carried out to ensure conformity to security requirements. Back-ups are performed each month and the back-up data is kept safe from illegal access in a locked outbuilding on the medical transcription company’s property.
• Floppy disk drives and other external drives are made inoperative on each computer
• 256 bit AES encryption
• Fire extinguisher and smoke alarm are kept in the office within easy access
• Employees cannot bring into the office or take out from it plain paper, paper on which something is written, documents or electronic devices
• Protection provided by security personnel 24/7
• PHI document copies and damaged hard copies of notes are shredded on-site.
Taking full advantage of a free trial and asking questions can help you determine whether the service provider you are thinking of outsourcing to can achieve the level of accuracy and confidentiality you expect in medical transcription.
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