Medical transcription is an important link in the chain delivering quality healthcare, adding value to the healthcare process by creating patient records from the audio of the patient-healthcare professional encounter. However this process requires skills, commitment and investment from the healthcare facility to be accurate and timely. Investing valuable resources may dilute the focus of the healthcare facilities from their core objective of providing quality healthcare.

One easy fix to ensure that creation of patient records takes place in a timely, accurate, secure and cost effective manner is to outsource the entire process to a qualified and professional transcription vendor. This not only ensures timely, accurate, secure and cost effective creation of patient records, but also enables the healthcare facility to avail unique solutions to their specific needs.

What are unique solutions for medical transcription needs?

It is commonly understood that the healthcare facilities differ not only in terms of the number of healthcare professionals, the size of the facility, the services offered but also in other variables like:

· Specialties: Medicine is a vast field having various specialties. Healthcare facilities could offer one or a combination of more than one specialty. Each specialty has its own language. Any company offering unique solutions would take this into consideration while designing solutions for the healthcare facilities. Factors like turnaround time; templates/formats etc could be affected by the specialty transcribed for.

· Expansion plans: While availing specialty services for creation of patient medical records, healthcare facilities need to seek out service providers who can not only service current needs but also have the capacity to service future needs. The service provider should have the manpower and technical backup to be able to cope with expanding needs for transcription

· Technical support level required: The technical support required for medical transcription could vary according to the needs and aptitude of the healthcare professionals. To provide unique solutions, software and tools to support the varying needs of healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities would have to be customized

· Formats/templates of reports: The requirement of different healthcare professionals for report formats/ templates and even fonts could vary. The transcription vendor needs to have the capacity to serve the unique needs of healthcare professionals/healthcare facilities

· Adoption of EMR: EMR requires a substantial investment from the healthcare facilities. The service provider needs to be able to support EMR adoption by having the capacity to interface through HL7 integration

· Speech recognition transcription: Some healthcare professionals/healthcare facilities would even require editing services for speech recognition transcription. This requirement needs to be fulfilled by the service provider

· Turnaround time required: The turnaround time requirements of different healthcare professionals under different circumstances could vary. These turnaround time requirements of different healthcare professionals need to be accommodated

· Archiving facilities: Healthcare facilities with a large number of healthcare professionals would require a medical transcription system to trace dictations, work-in-progress and transcripts

· Dictation modes: The unique modes of dictation used by healthcare professionals to enable them to make optimum use of their limited time need to be configured and accepted

· Support levels required: Transition to outsourced services could be made easier by having the right kind of support to answer/solve any queries/issues as they arise

· Document delivery modes: The medical transcription service provider needs to have the technology to accommodate the unique document delivery modes required by healthcare professionals

· Multi user access: Certain transcripts may require multiple users access; these need to be enabled in the transcription system.

It is important that the service provider should create unique solutions that are specifically formulated taking into consideration the requirements of the healthcare professionals/healthcare facilities.