Let’s face it, at any one time doctors have to deal with a wide assortment of different cases that adds a lot of work to their already tight schedules. As such, AAFP states that they need all the help that they can get otherwise they will burn themselves out in no time which doesn’t help them, the hospital or the patients they care for. It is based on this that this article focuses on the different ways that hospitals can help in preventing their doctors from burning out.

HIRE MORE DOCTORS

One of the main reasons why doctors burn out in hospitals is simply because they have been overworked. While it is true that hospitals do have the right to cut expenses whenever they can, they should not do so at the expense of their current doctor’s welfare. As such, it is highly recommended that hospitals at least consider hiring more doctors when it is evident that they are dealing with more patients that they can feasibly handle.

HIRE A TRANSCRIPTION COMPANY

Aside from hiring more doctors, The Happy MD states that it is also advisable that they hire a transcription company to help with the sheer amount of transcriptions that doctors have to deal with on a daily basis. Based on the findings from Time.com, it was noted that doctors spend more than two hours a day simply filling out all the necessary transcriptions of their patients. In fact, they often leave this for the last part of the day resulting in them having to put in even more overtime simply for the transcriptions alone. It is based on this that a hospital should consider hiring companies such as Eyered Transcription for work such as urology transcription so that they give their doctors more time to rest.

UTILIZE ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS

The role of electronic medical records at the present is that they act as a replacement for the current manual filing and recording system utilized by hospitals and medical institutions. They enable doctors and medical practitioners alike to immediately pull up a patient’s medical history and treatment procedures in a way that results in a more rapid and efficient method of medical treatment. As such, electronic medicals records can be considered an effective means of efficiently and effectively sharing patient data with doctors and medical practitioners.

The problem with having to deal with physical medical records is that it can take up a considerable amount of tim1e just looking for them. While this can be considered as a relatively minor inconvenience, it should be noted that this adds into the time it takes for doctors to properly screen and diagnoses their patients and, as such, having electronic medical records can help considerably in eliminating this sort of problem thereby making the jobs of doctors a lot easier.

CREATE BETTER CLINICAL SUPPORT SYSTEMS

The inherent problem with clinical support systems at the present is that even though they improve the performance of nurses and doctors, there is still a distinct difficulty in workflow integration. For example, studies examining the use of clinical support systems have shown that on average there was a tendency in various cases to focus on the functional decision making the core of clinical support systems which inadvertently caused a deficiency in planning how a doctor or nurse would actually use the system. Not only that, clinical support systems are often standalone systems which require employees to stop what they are doing on one system in order to shift to the clinical support system which in effect breaks the workflow and from the doctor’s or nurse’s perspective actually causes more time needed for the research and input to be done.

Another problem with these systems are numerous warnings that keep on appearing which doctors have learned to ignore due to the sheer amount; however, some of the warnings are, in fact, necessary, this causes problems not only for the doctor but also for the patient who may have an allergic reaction to the medication yet the doctor ignored the warning due to irritation. It is due to a combination of these factors that clinical support systems have been in decline over the years. One suggested a method of resolving this could come by fixing the system to make it integrate with other hospital systems and make it far more user-friendly. While yes this can be considered as a large investment by the hospital, it would go a long way towards making the job of doctor’s that much easier.

Given that the current variances in the way in which healthcare is applied in different states as well as the fact that some hospitals at the present simply do not have the funding necessary to implement the changes advocated for in this article, it is understandable that such improvements won’t be seen in some time. However, if hospitals truly want to prevent their doctors from burning out, they should at least consider some of the proposed changes.

More and more practices are looking to outsource medical transcription services nowadays, and recent technological advances have made the benefits of transcription even more apparent, and subsequently relevant. According to statistics gathered at MedGadget, the global medical transcription market is expected to reach a value of over $60 million by 2019, and with the implementation of electronic health records and voice dictation technology, now is the time to take advantage of everything a transcription service has to offer. When you’re running a small practice with a minimal amount of staff, you’ll want to make sure that every minute of your time counts, and that you’re spending more time with patients and less time managing paperwork and files while sitting in front of a computer.

Here at Eyered Transcription, we boast an exceptional medical transcription business, offering quality service with a high level of efficiency and productivity to get you what you need, as accurately and as quickly as possible. Read on for five ways that our transcription services can help benefit your small practice and optimize you and your staff’s time in the office.

ACCESS TO PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE

With our transcription services, you’ll have access to hundreds of our full-time medical transcription professionals, ready to handle your dictated text with quick turnaround time. Since transcription is a skill that requires a high level of experience, our services will supply you with the immediate satisfaction that comes along with a skilled, qualified employee. You’ll avoid the potentially lengthy search and hiring process for an in-house transcriptionist. With our service, the best of the best transcriptionists have already been found for you.

IT CAN SAVE YOUR MONEY

Not having to hire an in-house transcriptionist comes along with its own extra set of benefits, as well. You’ll wind up saving money, as you won’t have to worry about paying another full-time staff member to work with you in the office. And with our services, you also only pay for what you need– we charge you by the line of text, which makes our service conveniently scalable for you and your budget. It’s easy to see the difference in the cost of our services, versus the costs of a full-time salary plus any charges related to recruiting and training.

INCREASE THE PRODUCTIVITY OF YOUR STAFF

With our services, you won’t have to worry about having a staff member available to hastily type up your notes into an electronic medical record as you dictate them during an exam. Your staff will be able to spend less time at the computer, and more time dealing with patients on the upfront and personal level. They’ll be able to focus more on answering patient questions, answering phone calls, and giving you the preparation and assistance you need for the best patient care. You won’t have to worry about rushing through patients in order to get to paperwork or to grab some time to update your notes. You’ll be able to focus your productivity on where it matters most– patient care and office operations– rather than having your staff organizing loads of paperwork or trying to keep up with the transcription of piles upon piles of chart notes.

As Inc. notes, the use of electronic medical records has already reduced extra work around the office, and by using our services, you’ll save even more time, as you’ll be able to simply copy and paste our secure transcription files into your patient’s electronic chart.

ACCURACY AND GUARANTEED COMPLIANCE

Not only will you receive accurate transcriptions from our professional staff, but you also won’t have to worry about HIPAA issues. According to Medical Economics, making sure that HIPAA violations are avoided and that your practice is completely compliant is one of the top challenges that physicians face. Our transcriptionists are well-trained in HIPAA compliance, and we can guarantee that all of your files will be electronically delivered in a safe, secure, and confidential manner.

ONE LESS THING FOR YOU TO MANAGE

Without having to worry about in-house staff handling your transcription, you’ll have more time to handle other important aspects of your business. Running your own private practice can be busy, stressful, and complicated, but having a transcription service for your notes and charts can make everything a little bit easier for you. While using a dictaphone or other handheld recorder, you’ll be able to quickly and accurately speak your notes, and rest assured that they will be handled and transcribed with professional accuracy. You won’t have to worry about them again– just dictate, and let us handle the rest. Once again, you’ll be able to put your focus where it matters most– with your patients.

In this age of electronic health records and continuously advancing technology in the medical world, there’s no reason not to make the change. Keep your data up-to-date, accurate, and well organized with our convenient, skilled transcription services.

Medicine has had a troubling history with credibility and reputation. Not too long ago, doctors were more often than not hacks and butchers, and our ideas of modern medicine were so crude that you’d have better luck just riding your disease out with good food and healthy company. Hospitals were known to be dirty and dangerous during the Industrial Revolution, and the clergy didn’t help instill much faith in medicine.

But that changed with the advent of the germ theory and anesthesia, and the evolution of these two into the strict regulations and conformities we’ve become used to as of late. With lobbying power over television and the media, surgeons and doctors changed the image of the quack to the professional with the starched coat and stethoscope.

Hospitals Are Aging

Since then, hospitals have hit another hurdle – digital lagging. As USA Today points out, healthcare is behind – especially when it comes to utilizing the advantages of web-based computing and the Internet. Disruptive technologies have leaked into major industries everywhere, from education to transportation and food – law and medicine always seem to be the last places for these disruptive ideas to penetrate, but they are slowly coming through.

According to the Ponemon Institute survey, over $8 billion are lost annually in productivity and increased patient discharge times across all US hospitals. The productivity cost alone adds up to $5 billion annually, the study found.

Widespread change, on the other hand, has been a question of adoption and penetration. The tech to improve medicine is out there, and it’s implementable – with great, widespread benefits. Hospitals simply have to take a proactive step in the right direction.

 Electronic Medical Records

The simplest implementation of modern tech in medicine today is cataloging. Between outsourced services and the speed and cost-efficiency of today’s cloud-based servers, hospitals could drastically improve their filing system and eradicate a huge amount of paper and useless tech by adopting a secure, encrypted cloud server system for their medical records.

Even the techniques and standards for the cataloging itself have improved. EMR transcription today is no longer a question of hiring an in-house transcriber and waiting hours for a professional transcription – hospitals today can utilize services like Eyered Transcription to take full advantage of both their own time and the premium-quality services that transcription services provide. And today, they are much more competitive and feature-filled than they have been in the past.

 Systemized Collection of Practices

One of the greatest tragedies among hospitals is the loss of a patient who could have been saved if practices had been updated. Globally, the quality of medicine across the world carries extreme discrepancies – and not just because of a lack of training or equipment.

There is a general lack of knowledge and intercommunication between doctors globally – or at least, there was. Modern technology – especially through the Internet – offers a potential future wherein doctors can share the newest standardized practices instantaneously. By having the know-how available online in a format wherein it can be immediately looked up, doctors save themselves the trouble of slugging great large medical books onto a table and dutifully scanning their pages for some clue to treating a rarer condition.

All this is especially useful for combating epidemics, which, as populations continue to explode, become a greater threat without global intercommunication between hospitals, governments, and doctors in updated practices and necessary precautions.

Digital Microbiology and Stem Cell Research

Another tool that has taken a step into unknown territory within medicine is the digital analysis of disease, and the ability to study the effects of something on humans without questionable ethical action.

Through computer modeling and analytical software, simulations can be created to explore and test the effects of any given virus or bacteria. As we learn more about microbiology, it becomes easier to study its potential under the digital microscope, rather than an actual sample within a Petri dish.

Adult stem cell research has also shown itself to be more effective than animal testing, especially due to the removal of the lack of compatibility between potential human cures tested on non-human subjects.

As the Baltimore Sun pointed out as far back as 2006, animal testing is rendered effectively obsolete – yet the Washington Post pointed out that over $150 million were spent this year alone on completely useless studies, at the cost of tortured animals. It’s high time for healthcare and research to take a big step into the 21^st century, on all fronts.

There’s more. Big data is useful for more than just consumer information and behavioral analytics – it can be used to aggregate the kind of data necessary to effectively and reliably test and study the health factors of an entire region, which is especially useful when studying and tracing epidemics and viral infections. Data is the future, for better or for worse, and it’s important that medicine embraces it responsibly to save lives.

With the burden of healthcare reform putting constant new pressures on clinics and hospitals, cost-cutting has become a constant necessary practice. It may seem a little superfluous to explain why cutting costs are important – after all, cut costs are always good news, right? However, cost cutting can potentially lead to a loss in quality – unless you’re smart about it.

Hospitals that want to survive the reforms and the economic slowdown that 2008 and beyond has caused, have to use their ingenuity and technological changes to come up with ways to both save money and introduce higher quality in their services – a monumental task for most clinics and hospitals, especially with the juggling act it suggests.

But one way to cut costs without sacrificing quality is through the trend of outsourcing, and offshoring. The question is – are these practices relevant to the healthcare industry? Furthermore, how can they be implemented? And what do they do? As a specific example, we’ll take one of the more mundane yet absolutely essential components of a functioning healthcare facility – transcription services.

Saving Money Through Low-Cost Human Capital

Entrepreneurs know what it means to regularly outsource – a startup may outsource most of its needs, in an attempt to build a business without a dedicated team. Larger established players in the field, like hospitals, use outsourcing to cut costs – and transcription services are an excellent example of how well it works. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, outsourcing is becoming more common in the medical transcriptionist profession, alongside tech advances changing the landscape of transcription services.

Medical transcription work is specialized work, but it can still be outsourced to companies and services that build their teams through low-cost educated human capital. This is especially true in countries with a lower cost of living, where competitive rates ensure that professionals retain a high degree of capability and quality without the kind of cost associated with similarly skilled professionals on the home front. A hospital or clinic is, in the first line, a private business – keeping costs low and the bottom line healthy is what counts.

 Saving on Unused Equipment

Hospitals typically have an outdated infrastructure – even when it comes to transcription services, outsourcing to a quality company will net you a higher level of quality in the end product, than running transcription services through in-house equipment.

In turn, that equipment can be sold off. The same can be seen in hospitals and clinics that digitally outsource their billing, thus saving money on printers, printing ink, and a number of other costs such as in-house delivery services and collection. Aside from money, all these things also cost a lot of time – time better spent tending to patients, especially considering the epidemic of understaffing among hospitals nationwide.

Web-based transcription is the way to go, and medical transcription services know that. Not many hospitals and clinics are equipped with Internet-based data systems, however. While there is a lot data on how “intelligent infrastructure” can benefit hospitals, only the more upscale healthcare facilities can afford to equip themselves with updated IT. Sadly, this also leads to an immense loss of revenue and wasted resources – according to the WHO, that wasted sector amounts to 40 percent of all resources used by hospitals.

Doctors, physicians, and practitioners can still receive their transcriptions on their own computers for data compilation, over a secured network.

Saving Money Through Redirected/Reduced Staff

Outsourcing doesn’t just reduce costs by being cheaper to finance and oversee than in-house production – it also saves you unnecessary manpower. Through outsourcing services like pain management transcription through quality companies like Eyered Transcription, your fixed costs become variable costs – since you’re not paying for the salaries of an outsourced service, but rather the service itself based on each individual order, you can utilize these savings to instead raise your nurse-to-patient ratio, or save costs even further by updating crucial IT infrastructure and cutting some of the $8 billion wasted annually in the healthcare industry due to an outdated infrastructure, according to a Ponemon Institute survey reported about on USA Today.

These costs include the expenses of inefficiency, such as the time it takes nurses to respond to calls, inquire on the nature of the calls, leave, and return with the requested drug, doctor or item. A better system would allow patients to send detailed requests directly to a nurse through web-based applications and a dedicated private hospital server while making it easier for doctors to access patient files through encrypted servers rather than keeping them largely in paper form.

Smart Outsourcing Consistently Produces Success

As Forbes points out, outsourcing is good for more than just cutting costs – it allows you to tap outside of local talent, and access global talent through online companies that specialize in your outsourced service. Outsourcing helps you focus on the core task of your hospital or clinic while leaving the more mundane but necessary aspects of running a healthcare facility in the hands of capable professional companies in competitive global markets – all while reducing your overhead.

To outsource, or not to outsource? For some clinics, practices, and hospitals, outsourcing can be either a boon or a legal complication waiting to happen. Some are worried about the implications of having third parties be responsible for individual components within a medical event – billing companies, for example, or in our case, transcription services.

But the argument for outsourcing things such as transcription is compelling – very compelling in the face of the facts. The fact is, hospitals and clinics are in need of updated practices. Many are also in need of better budgets and money-saving opportunities. Money is a big problem among hospitals, and outsourcing is an excellent solution – but that’s not all.

Hospitals Are Understaffed As It Is

Take a respiratory clinic, for example. Pulmonary transcription requires people to be there and do the writing, the cataloging, and the systemization of reports and data in a way that makes them accessible in the future. Eyered Transcription puts an emphasis on quality and precision, but in the hectic environment of a clinic or hospital, nurses and staff tasked with transcription work could make better use of their time elsewhere in the building, increasing staff efficiency and cutting down on some of the overtime medical professionals are constantly subjected to.

Understaffing isn’t an old problem – it’s present, it’s troublesome, and it carries strong statistical risks. As the Scientific American points out, studies show that higher nurse-to-patient ratios correlate to lower patient deaths – and the reverse is true as well. The New York Times reported that a study by the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research showed that if the working conditions of every hospital in the country were raised to the top quarter of the nation’s healthcare centers, then over 40,000 lives would be saved annually.

Understaffing is a serious issue, and delegating some of a clinic or hospital’s responsibility to professional, quality third-party services would alleviate some serious pressure from hospitals that suffer under the current shortage in nurses and other staff.

THE EQUIPMENT IS EXPENSIVE AND UNNECESSARY

It isn’t just a question of manpower, however. There’s more to the dilemma than a lack of hands-on-deck – there’s a serious budgetary issue, as well. Many hospitals are not aging very gracefully, being instead stuck in the past with fax machines and inefficient paper-based filing systems – and, of course, printers and old computers used for transcription services and billing. By eliminating the need to finance and regulate these services in-house through expensive equipment and staff, hospitals save money and get a greater return on investment through their contract with a professional transcription service.

Money saved from selling old equipment may also be used to invest in newer infrastructure, which could help decrease readmission rates, save more lives, and bring in a better revenue in hospitals that are desperate for a slight loosening of the purse strings. A huge tech overhaul would greatly benefit hospitals looking to make their work more efficient and safe – but despite the diagnosis being written on the wall, it’s taking some time for the patient to be sent into the OR.

THE TRANSCRIPTION GAME HAS CHANGED

Another reason why outsourcing a transcription service is hugely beneficial is the fact that transcription isn’t what it used to be. Today, voice recognition software can essentially do the bulk of the average work – that is, turn what’s being said into printed words. So transcription services have had to innovate, find ways to create a better service and compete with the rapid technology evolving around them.

Good transcription services are relying on quality to outperform automation. Great transcription services are working with technological advances to produce better data, better organization, easier and simpler transcription methods, and a focus on system efficiency and safer data practices. A qualitative third-party service can ensure reliability in the sector of transcription, saving hospitals a lot of grief and money.

IN THE END, ALL THIS TRANSLATES TO WHAT?

Hospitals are understaffed, faced with enormous pressure, and surrounded by a world that’s rapidly evolving with technology, in contrast to the 90s infrastructure still used by many lower-budget facilities.

Making the jump to outsourcing can help a clinic with a tightened belt let loose a little, and spend time and money on an updated infrastructure to better serve patients and save lives. Equipment used to perform tasks that can be reliably outsourced to local or international third-party companies can be sold off or auctioned off for an extra influx of revenue.

And finally, third-party services are competitive enough to ensure ease-of-use – Eyered Transcription, for example, allows seamless transcription services over the phone or internet, at an accurate rate with guaranteed quality control and access to the file securely over encryption, to ensure patient confidentiality and medical discretion.