The Evolving Medical Transcription

Medical Transcription is a fast growing and evolving sector that has been influenced by many factors over the years. As preferences and standards have changed, one of the significant aspects of medical transcription has been the shift to electronic patient record. What are the basic factors for this evolution? They include,

• Advancement in technology
• Practice workflow
• Regulations

There has been a lot of demand to enhance patient safety, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. However, even though it has become mandatory for service providers and healthcare practices to migrate to a HIPAA compliant environment there are many companies who still have not yet adhere to this requirement.

In the distant future one can be sure that the voice recognition software will greatly improve and may slowly even replace manual transcription. Adopted technologies such as speech recognition software and application service providers (ASPs) can keep up with the demands of regulations, standards, and cutting-edge demands in this sector. One can also expect that unlike today, medical coding may become embedded within documentation thereby not requiring a separate process and reduce the overall cost of medical transcription.

There is also the growing need for medical transcription to comply with basic Principles of documentation that has been developed by the Consensus Workgroup on Healthcare Documentation & Report Generation. It will look into the following aspects of transcription.

• Patient details
• Accuracy of document
• Completeness
• Timeliness
• Interoperability
• Retrievability
• Authentication
• Accountability
• Auditability
• Confidentiality
• Security

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based company that offers services in medical billing, medical coding and medical transcription.