As medical transcription is the process of creating patient medical records from the dictation of the healthcare professionals of their encounter with patients, quality is one of the most important criteria. Most outsourced medical transcription service providers have an established procedure for ensuring high standards of quality. Quality of transcripts is the responsibility of everyone who is involved in the creation of transcripts.
One of the significant factors that affect the quality/ accuracy of transcripts is blanks. While in some cases leaving blanks in the final transcript is unavoidable or sometimes even preferred by the healthcare professional, in most cases blanks left in the transcripts affects the accuracy and should be avoided.
What causes blanks to occur?
There could be various reasons for the occurrence of blanks in transcripts transmitted back by medical transcription companies, some of which are listed below:
- Faulty audio
- Incomplete dictation
- Less than desirable dictation practices
- Discrepancy in the details dictated
- Blanks specifically requested by authors
- Unfamiliar or unverifiable terminology
- Preexisting blanks
To minimize the occurrence of blanks in transcripts it necessary to employ a strategy that pervades all the entities involved in the creation of patient medical records.
- Author: As the healthcare professional is the originator of the patient record it is important to concentrate efforts on improving quality from this level itself. The measures to be taken to improve the quality of transcripts from the healthcare professional end are:
1. Familiarize healthcare professional with recording equipment
2. Enable them to use dictation devices of their choice
3. Educate them on dictation best practices
4. Provide feedback on the quality of dictation provided by them
5. Provide them with template/format for dictation
- Healthcare facility staff: As the dictation originates from the healthcare facility premises it is important to educate the healthcare facility staff on the importance of providing a HIPAA compliant and relatively quiet environment for healthcare professionals to record their dictation
- Medical transcriptionist: Apart from the healthcare professional, one of the most important contributors to the quality of the transcript is the medical transcriptionist/ medical transcriptionists working on the transcription. To ensure that errors are minimized and quality is maximized, medical transcriptionists have to be empowered with:
1. Proper training in the specialty they are transcribing in
2. The know how to adjust audio speed to ensure maximum clarity
3. Reference materials to help find elusive words
4. Train them to apply context to help fill the blanks as accurately as possible
5. Provide them with feedback to enable improvement
6. Collect feedback from medical transcriptionists to be given to healthcare professionals for improving their dictation practices
- Medical transcription service provider: The medical transcription service provider has a definitive role to play in improvement of quality and minimizing blanks. The medical transcription service provider can help maximize quality by:
1. Have a process in place to ensure that each transcript undergoes a stringent quality assurance process involving more than one set of “eyes and ears”
2. Have a complete set of updated templates and macros for each healthcare professional/ healthcare facility, which should be provided to the medical transcriptionist team working on it
3. Having quality audits on a regular basis
4. Using the findings from quality audits as learning tools
5. Provide medical transcriptionists with good training
6. Make updating and educating medical transcriptionists a continuous and automatic process
It can be seen that while outsourcing medical transcription it is not only important to assess the medical transcription service provider based on the quality commitment given by them but also assess the quality program of the medical transcription service provider to ensure that they have sound quality processes in place to ensure quality transcripts.
TransDyne, a leader in the outsourced medical transcription industry has been servicing the needs of healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals for over a decade. TransDyne understands the importance of quality in medical transcription and has provisions in place to ensure the right support to enable quality transcription.
TransDyne has made quality a key word in their work processes. This attitude of adopting quality as the basis of their services and their aptitude in information technology has helped them come up with easy to use medical transcription solutions that help save on time, money and efforts.
TransDyne offers quality medical transcription at reasonable prices, executed by experienced and qualified medical transcriptionists with a very quick turnaround time executed through secure HIPAA and HITECH compliant channels, with very high levels of accuracy and all this with technology that is advanced but easy to use!
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