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December 2018
December 12, 2018

Audio Transcription: A Glimpse Into The World of Medical Dictation

Medical Transcription services are essential to the healthcare industry and cater to many subfields and specialties of the medical profession.

Offering technical and organizational expertise, medical transcriptionists transcribe audio recordings and doctors’ dictation. This isn’t limited to any speciality—transcription is important everywhere, from dermatology and orthopedics to cardiology and gynecology.

The Importance Of Medical Transcription

Patient records and information are often useful in more than one way. For example, they’re commonly used as evidence or reference in various legal cases, including cases of medical practice lawsuits and disputes involving health insurance claims. This means that the services rendered by medical transcriptionists are all the more indispensable in today’s healthcare industry.

Accuracy and data security have moved beyond simply being ‘important’; they can often be a matter of life and death. It’s essential, then, to hire reliable medical transcription service providers.

The service is often referred to as audio transcription since the dictation is sent in as a recording. This is then transcribed into a digital document that can be repurposed any way the healthcare professional sees fit.

Most medical transcription service providers employ transcriptionists who specialize in transcribing medical dictation from an audio clip. Our services include:

  • Emergency room (ER) summaries—The emergency room is one of the busiest rooms in a hospital. Most cases brought in to this high-pressure environment need urgent treatment, and doctors, nurses, and other medical staff tend to communicate quickly and, sometimes, over each other. A trained audio transcriptionist can ensure accuracy in an ER summary report.
  • Consultation and clinical report—These are often used for future reference and diagnosis.
  • Physical reports and patient history—Detailed patient information and history, along with family medical history, is essential to proper diagnosis and assessment. Physical reports are proof of the current condition of the patient and his/her symptoms.
  • Discharge summaries—This is crucial to efficient home care according to the doctor’s instructions. These documents also mention any special restriction or care that the patient needs to undertake for a speedy recovery. They are also used for future references in the event of a relapse.
  • Therapy reports—This includes a summary of what the patient has done and said, and also the therapist’s note on the patient’s condition. The report also details what exercises were prescribed to the patient, and how much of these were actually accomplished; many of these reports also include plans and progress notes for future sessions.

Apart from these, medical transcriptionists can transcribe death summaries, surgery reports, and summaries, and patient progress notes.

Dictation can be sent in various formats—such as through digital recordings or using certain applications. The latter transfer dictation to the service provider’s servers directly, once the physician has dictated details into their phone. Telephonic dictation is also possible; this can be availed from anywhere—at a hospital, a patient’s home, or using the cell phone.

Medical audio transcription is not a small industry by any stretch; here are some of the frequently asked questions about medical audio transcription services.

READ MORE: SPEECH RECOGNITION TRANSFORMED THE PROCESS OF MEDICAL DICTATION AND TRANSCRIPTION?

FAQs

What influences the turnaround?

The turnaround depends on a number of factors; the most important one is audio quality. Audio with an unclear accent, background noise, or highly technical content is hard to transcribe, as compared to a clear and crisp audio clip.

Length is also crucial; the time taken to transcribe long files is, of course, more than short files.

In what formats are the transcribed files delivered?

Medical dictations are transcribed into text or MS Word formats. These files are then encrypted and sent by secure FTP, email, or pasted to our client’s EMR systems.

How does billing take place?

Pricing varies from firm to firm. A few charges on a per-minute basis, while others charge per line. It’s best to go for the second option, as you surely wouldn’t want to pay for all the silent periods in your audio.

What is verbatim transcription?

Verbatim transcriptions are the one that retains every single utterance—including false words like ‘ah’, ‘uh’, and wrong words like ‘gonna’, ‘coz’, and the like. You can request transcribers to follow a certain level of verbatim in the transcribed file.

Audio transcriptionists are indispensable to the healthcare industry, especially in the quest for effective patient care.

By: Anna williams Category: blog
December 7, 2018

Why should physicians take the help of the medical transcription service?

Practicing medicine in today’s stressful world is not that easy for physicians.  They need to focus on documentation along with the core healthcare tasks. Managing patient details, keeping a record of their illness and laboratory summaries consume a lot of time of the physician and the medical staff. If still hesitant to take professional help from medical transcriptionists it’s time to engage one so as to not waste time on tasks and instead concentrate on patient care.

Many doctors work as family physicians and are solely responsible for the health care of families they are responsible for or have a long-standing association with. The family practice management is something for which they need to develop skills with time, as there is no scope for medical errors. Family physicians not only have to keep a record of past illness, allergies, ailments and drug history of the members of a  family but also need to present those records on an immediate basis in case of an emergency. Here comes the important role of family practice transcription service in making the professional life of family physicians easier.

Let’s have a detailed idea of how the family practice transcription service can be a boon for family physicians.

Increases their practice efficiency

Physicians develop a long-lasting relationship with families whose healthcare responsibility is on them. Even in case of medical emergencies, families refer to their family physician first. This makes it even more important for physicians to refer to their past medical records quickly and start the treatment as soon as possible. When family physicians take help of medical transcription agencies, they end up concentrating on the health of their patients rather than managing their records. Also, the clinical records are transcribed and managed by professionals in such a manner that physicians can refer to them whenever they want.

By taking the onus of documentation work, medical transcription agencies allow physicians to have more time to concentrate on the health care of their patients.  This leads to the increased efficiency of their practice, helping them serve families better as well as increase the reach of their practice. Such transcription agencies also assure quick turnaround time that is quite important in the dynamic healthcare industry where time is a constraint.

Helps them in increasing practice revenue

The family practice transcription service not only helps physicians to increase the efficiency of their practice but also helps them in getting more patients. It’s the word of mouth publicity, where a family talks about the efficient service of its physician with their friends and relatives. This, in turn, brings more patients to the clinic. An efficient healthcare service by a physician helps him/her to get more patients, thus, more revenue.

When physicians outsource the medical transcription service, they also succeed in winning the confidence of their patients. Patients can rest assured that their personal details and medical history will not only be transcribed accurately but also that such details will be kept confidential. Such confidence of patients in their physicians will be beneficial for both.

Will technology replace family practice transcription service?

Speech recognition software may seem like a danger in the face of manual medical transcription at present, but it has its own loopholes. You cannot rely completely upon technology for recognizing the voice and converting it into text. Medical transcription agencies make the best use of technology and human skills to deliver error-free reports within a quick turnaround time.

There are many such agencies which offer reliable and accurate family practice transcription services. While selecting the one that best suits the specific requirements, family physicians need to search for those who are experienced in the field and offer customized services.

A good physician is judged by his compassion for his/her healthcare task and the intelligence in taking help of experts for documentation. The one who spends too much time on documentation is bound to lack with the healthcare task!

By: Anna williams Category: blog