Why Medical Transcription is Still the Best Option for Good Medical Documentation

Why Medical Transcription is Still the Best Option for Good Medical Documentation Medical transcription services ensure accurate medical documentation and allow physicians to focus on providing better care for their patients.

When Electronic Health Records (EHRs) were introduced, many believed that medical transcription would vanish from the medical transcription industry. But medical transcription still continues to exist and grow. To provide a second opinion and exams for insurance companies or workers compensation and disability claims, physicians still rely on traditional dictation and medical transcription services to document medical notes.

The Department of Labor predicted a 3% decline from 2016 through 2026, the numbers show that the profession of medical transcription is still viable and will continue to be relevant as medical tests and procedures grow.

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Electronic Health Records The process of medical transcription is considered costly. According to a recent Becker’s Health IT &CIO Report, Buffalo, New York-based Catholic Health is investing more than $100 million in a project to implement an Epic EHR. The project is targeted to take around 18 months. When such projects are undertaken, there will a push in healthcare organizations to minimize cost and physicians and other healthcare workers will be encouraged to selfdocument medical records.

As part of the negotiation with the transcription vendor,

physicians demand lower line rates and tighter turnaround times.

EHR templates and drop down lists, etc. were introduced to make clinical documentation easier for physicians. This leads healthcare providers to spend time learning the features of the EHR. Front-end speech recognition requires providers to edit/proofread their results to ensure that the templated information is entered accurately. With the EHR system, physicians are forced to spend hours on the computer to document patient records themselves, which reduces time spent with patients. This affects quality of patient care and the face to face consultation. EHRs have made clinical documentation more complex and the situation became more difficult with the transition to bundled and value-based payments.

Various reports showed that physicians faced a diminished enthusiasm for their profession as their task were less about patient relationships and more about coding, billing, reimbursement, and compliance. The 2016 Survey of America’s Physicians: Practice Patterns & Perspectives, which interviewed more than 17,000 physicians reported that physician job satisfaction was on the decline, with close to 50% reporting frequent or constant feelings of professional burnout.

Speech Recognition Technology Speech recognition technology (SRT) was considered another threat to medical transcription.

Speech recognition technology works in two ways: in back-end speech recognition, the user dictates, the audio is converted to text, and a trained medical transcriptionist edits the resulting document; in front end speech recognition, the user dictates directly into free-text fields and edits the transcription with no intervention necessary by the medical transcriptionist.

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According to “Errors in Clinical Dictations Created Using Speech Recognition Software and Professional Transcriptionists,” published in JAMA Network Open, a 7.4 percent of error rate occurred when documentation was generated by speech recognition software, while the error rate was only 0.4 percent when the audio was transcribed by a professional medical transcriptionist. This shows the significance of medical transcription in today’s world.

SRT’s ability to understand odd-sounding and same-sounding words, medical terms, drug names, and phrases is still limited, which can lead to errors in medical documentation, which can compromise patient safety and compliance.

Lasting Importance of Medical Transcription 

Improved medical record accuracy: Medical transcription ensure better accuracy than any other advanced technology. Accurate medical records help healthcare professionals to provide better treatment and patient care.

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Support for staff: Medical transcription supports healthcare staff, especially nurses.

In the absence of the concerned doctor, the nurses, and other staff members should know how to care for the patient, recognize the major warning signs of serious illness, the appropriate medication to administer for the condition and at what time, etc.

Medical transcripts help with this.

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Ensures HIPAA compliance: HIPAA compliance is essential to safeguard the confidentiality of patient health information. HIPAA compliant medical transcription ensures that healthcare professionals get their patient-doctor conversation transcribed in proper format and sent back to them securely.

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Minimizes dependency on software tools: Software tools like EHR/EMR are designed to ease physicians’ documentation tasks. However, in reality, these tools have led to physician burnout and also compromise the quality of medical records.

But with medical transcription the dependency on software tools can be reduced and physicians can be assured of error free medical records.

A blended approach of both medical transcription and the EHR system is the ideal option.

Physicians can dictate using a convenient option and their audio recordings are sent to skilled medical transcriptionists. They transcribe the recorded notes into accurate transcripts which can be integrated into physician’s EHR. A reliable medical transcription services uses HL7 interface to provide EHR- integrated medical transcription for healthcare providers.

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