With the government pushing for the digitization of patient records, it is critical that health-care providers begin the process in a timely fashion and choose the best possible system to create electronic health record platforms, and satisfy meaningful use requirements.
Outsourcing medical transcription services ensures accurate and prompt creation of digitized patient records. The benefits of hiring a medical transcriptionist company to do this job include access to a sizable pool of highly skilled and trained transcriptionists, as well as access to the specialized software and tools needed for secure and efficient transcription.
Some health-care offices might try to do the job in-house, but office and professional staff will face many hurdles. First and foremost, specialized training is necessary in order to comply with the requirements and standards (including the mandated conversion to ICD-10) of electronic health records, or EHRs. For example, requirements for Stage 1 of Meaningful Use, as specified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (https://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/99_Meaningful_Use.asp), includes both a core set and a menu set of objectives that are specific to eligible professionals or eligible hospitals and CAHs. For eligible professionals alone, there are a total of 25 meaningful use objectives.
Health-care offices may opt to try to do the job with speech recognition software, but this can create its own problems, including requiring extensive -- and expensive -- proofreading and editing to meet acceptable quality standards. If the medical transcriptions are not completely accurate, they do a disservice to patients and health-care providers and defeat the purpose of digitizing medi records.
Another option that some health-care providers are contemplating is point-and-click templates, but they too fall short of the job done by a medical transcriptionist company. Shortcomings of point-and-click templates include that they take the focus of the health-care professional away from the patient, lack narrative and can lead to mistakes in documentation.
The promise and value anticipated with electronic health records can only be delivered with a precise and extended narrative from the health-care professionals involved. Studies have shown that the most reliable and efficient method of capturing this extended narrative is through the transcription of the full articulation of the patient encounter by the physician. Voice dictation and transcription remains the most efficient medium and the one with the greatest power to feed into the EHRs. Simply put, medical transcription by professionals trained in medical dictation yields better results than any other method now in use by health-care providers.
Thanks to http://www.mzonearticles.com/Art/56229/24/Medical-Transcription-Outsourcing-Bridging-the-Gap-to-Meaningful-Use.html for sharing this.
