Why Your Healthcare Practice Needs a Medical Transcription Service

A medical transcription company manually processes doctors’ and healthcare providers dictated reports into a text format, which can serve as a record of a patient’s care. Healthcare providers vocally record notes and then medical transcriptionists convert the voice files to text documents, typically in digital format for easy storage. Electronic data is becoming more prevalent for compliance with Health IT and electronic health record initiatives. Each transcribed medical record or report has its own date of service and is merged with the larger patient record to create a patient’s medical history.

Multi-Talented Transcriptionist

The process of medical transcription (MT) requires several essential qualities. A medical transcription company must be able to understand and accurately transcribe provider-dictated information into a document that is accurate and readable. Therefore, a medical transcriptionist must have in-depth knowledge of:

• the format and style of various forms/documents used
• medical terminology and abbreviations
• anatomy
• physiology
• therapeutic procedures
• treatments
• patient assessments
• workups
• diagnosis
• prognosis

In addition, they act as an editor of sorts requiring a thorough understanding of the English language, spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Sometimes the medical transcriptionist will encounter challenges such as:

• dictation by a dictator with a heavy accent
• dictation that includes background noise
• editing what the dictator says to make it more concise or accurate without changing the meaning

The Outlook for Medical Transcription Companies

Speech recognition may reduce the need for manual transcription, but speech recognition software is not accurate enough to replace a human transcriptionist service.

Muddled speech or mumbling can complicate the process for both the medical transcriptionists and the recognition software. While a transcriptionist can flag a report with issues, recognition software will transcribe using its given database of language whether it makes sense or not. The result can sound like a “word jumble” or may have missing text. The downside of this software is that the time spent correcting a “word jumble” into an intelligible document cancels out any of the possible benefits.

We Can Help

Skywriter MD can supply virtual medical scribes for medical transcription services for your healthcare practice or hospital. We use a team-based approach to provide you with medical transcriptionist services that will offer:

• a familiarity with your preferences and processes
• uninterrupted coverage
• more productivity for you
• improved patient care
• better job satisfaction

Contact Skywriter MD today and we will work together to improve healthcare one patient at a time.