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Medical Transcription Frequently Asked Questions
By an allied health world contributing writer
Published: February 28th, 2010
Why with advanced software are skilled medical transcriptionists still in high demand?
There are several reasons why transcriptionists continue to be needed and that the role of human intelligence is unable to be replaced completely by voice recognition and electronic medical records/electronic health records (EMR/EHR) technologies. Due to
the variability in medical language there will always be a need for a skilled person to review and edit the documents drafted from transcription software. There are not speech recognition software technology (SRT) programs available at this point that are capable of delivering a high quality, 98 percent or better accuracy of a draft document. So even providers who use SRT programs oftentimes need a medical transcriptionist to edit the draft document for accuracy.
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Another reason voice recognition software does not work well all of the time is that there are many physicians who speak English as a second language. Speech recognition software has a hard time transcribing for those with heavy accents or varied pronunciations.
Also, some doctors’ offices have started to use electronic medical records (EMRs), which involve a point and click system of templated responses and phrases to build a medical record. These systems oftentimes work great for family practice, general medicine, pediatrics and even radiology, where the terminology is highly repetitive and predictable. In these practices sometimes the job of the medical transcriptionist is eliminated due to the efficiency of these templated systems. However, EMRs are ineffective and too restrictive in specialty clinics and acute care facilities, where patient stories are too variable and complex to fit in a predetermined template. Physicians in these complex specialties need the ability to have some free text narrative to say what they need to about the patient. This information oftentimes doesn’t fit within the responses built into a template. In these cases a medical transcriptionist is needed.
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What other people do medical transcriptionists come in contact with regularly?
For those few medical transcriptionists who still work onsite rather than from home, they come in contact mainly with others who work in the medical records department including the medical records director and medical transcription supervisor. Transcriptionists working on site in a private practice or clinic setting will also have access to the physicians who operate that practice as well as other office personnel.How much time do transcriptionists have to transcribe a document?
Turn-around time (TAT) depends greatly on the nature of the document and whether ongoing clinical decision-making depends on its accessibility. With operative reports, for example, the physician who performed the surgery usually walks out of the operating room and heads directly to a dictation station to dictate exactly what took place during the procedure while it is still fresh in his/her mind. This report is very detailed and includes everything about the procedure from start to finish. The medical transcriptionist who is working for the facility then transcribes the dictation and it typically needs to be back in the patient’s chart within 24 hours. When the patient is improved enough from the surgery to be sent home, the physician will again dictate a full discharge summary, which remains on a patient’s long-term record.Outpatient settings, such as a physician’s office or clinic, typically do not have urgent timeframes on documentation. However, if a specialist physician performed a biopsy or is providing a consultative opinion, the turn-around time for results is more urgent than someone who just came in for an annual wellness visit. Basically the turn-around time on transcribed documents is contingent on whether the information in the report is necessary for future health care decisions for the patient.
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