Top Ten Reasons to Outsource Medical Transcription

What is Outsourcing? Subcontracting. Support. Managed services. However you define it, outsourcing has become the hot, creative solution that is helping more and more hospital CFOs, Health Information Managers (HIMs), and owners of physician practices do more with less. Less money. Less time. Less resources.

In these challenging times of tight budgets, compressed deadlines, exploding amounts of information, and stringent compliance regulations, managing medical transcription yourself can cost you in more ways than one. That's why outsourcing medical tanscription has become such an attractive solution for so many.

While outsourcing medical transcription is not a new concept, it might be new to you. And when done correctly, it's a pain-free process that gives you the freedom to focus on more important things, like patient care. Please take a few minutes to read the Top 10 Reasons why it can help you now to outsource medical transcription --- and in the long run.

Reason 1: Eliminate Capital Investment with Medical Transcription Outsourcing

When you outsource your entire medical transcription process, you no longer have to own a dictation system or invest in a typing platform or worry about upgrading to the very latest equipment.

In fact, all your capital expenses for supporting dictation and transcription are greatly reduced because you no longer have to own or maintain them. And maintaining these systems and varying equipment can really cost you, with the average maintenance agreement costing upwards of 17% of equipment costs, annually. Even if you only partially outsource your medical transcription, you can still reduce your expenses and make your budget work harder for you.

Reason 2: With Medical Transcription Outsourcing, Manage Report Volume and Staffing Fluctuations

There are some things you just can't control, no matter how hard you try. Report volume and staffing are just two of them, as these variables fluctuate without warning. Having to react to these challenges at a moment's notice can bring your day, department, and transcription process to a screeching halt.

Not to mention how these gyrations can negatively affect your budget. By outsourcing all of your medical transcription --- or even just the overflow --- you can cost-effectively manage sharp increases in report volume or a shortage in staffing without having it impact your turnaround time, workflow, quality, or compliance.

Reason 3: Outsource Medical Transcription and Reduce Management Expenses

Whether you're a CFO, Health Information Manager, or head your own physician practice, managing medical transcription in-house can be a costly proposition. With so many vast, overlapping layers to manage --- from dictation and routing to transcription and archiving --- there are variables at every turn, eager to steal your time, attention, and budget dollars. By outsourcing all or part of your transcription process, you are free to concentrate on more important priorities and leave all the headaches and stringent demands to your outsourcing partner. Outsourcing also reduces the need for robust in-house staffing which results in additional cost savings for you.

Reason 4: Reduce Direct Labor Costs

If you are managing your medical transcription process in-house, then most likely you are also carrying direct labor costs that are putting a strain on your already tight budget. As an integral part of document creation, transcriptionists and coding specialists are imperative to the success of your medical transcription process. Yet, hiring such staff as Full-Time Employees (FTEs) means not only having to pay their salaries, but also having to provide them with benefits. By outsourcing all or part of your medical transcription process, you can gain greater control, streamline your staff, and greatly reduce or eliminate these expenses.

Reason 5: Improve Report Accessibility and Distribution with Medical Transcription Outsourcing

A major benefit of outsourcing your medical transcription is finding a solution that's web-based. Through a secure, password-protected process, one can log-on to a user-friendly interface, search, view, edit, and print reports --- from any computer with Internet capabilities. You can also distribute documents to multiple destinations with the touch of a button. Older technologies, such as dictaphones and tape, do not give you that kind of easy, immediate accessibility. And because the solution is web-based, it comes with powerful keyword search capabilities so you can easily retrieve what you want, when you want it. You'll also have access to an entire year's worth of records, not just the last month or so by outsourcing your medical transcription.

Reason 6: Reduce IT Responsibility

When you manage medical transcription in-house, it greatly impacts your IT department. Not only are they expected to manage and troubleshoot the various medical transcription platforms and technologies you own, but they often inherit the maintenance of your onsite equipment. In addition, they're expected to keep up with the latest technology demands and updates to keep the system running to the best of its abilities. By outsourcing your medical transcription, you not only free up your IT team to work on more important things, but you also rescue a vast amount of space on the server that was once dedicated to supporting your dictation system. It all adds up to a more efficient, productive IT team and a faster, leaner server.

Reason 7: Eliminate HR Transcription Staff Recruitment

It's no secret there's a domestic shortage of qualified, certified medical transcriptionists. And maintaining a pool of dependable prospects you can call at a moment's notice puts a definite strain on any already burdened Human Resources (HR) department. With so few qualified medical transcriptionists to choose from and the constant need to fill the hospital's pipeline with new prospects, HR is caught in a losing proposition --- trying to fulfill constant requests from the HIMs and looking at a shallow prospect pool. By outsourcing your medical transcription, you eliminate the constant cycle of unsuccessful recruitment efforts and the inefficiencies and lost man-hours they incur.

Reason 8: Improve Report Accuracy and Turnaround Time

When you manage your own medical transcription process, you are ultimately responsible for the accuracy and turnaround time. Are you able to stringently measure performance and impose penalties if quality levels are not met? You can if you outsource your medical transcription process. Outsourcing medical transcription services regularly document their accuracy and turnaround time rate, making sure they have metrics that prove they're meeting Quality Assurance levels. Many outsourcing services also provide performance guarantees right in their contracts, which range from productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness to quality, turnaround time, and resource utilization.

Reason 9: Shorten Account Receivable Cycle

One of the easiest ways to shorten the accounts receivable cycle is to streamline your medical transcription process. If you manage your own medical transcription, you are managing people, records, medical coding, HIPAA compliance, technology, turnaround time, and all the possible variables that come with it. By outsourcing your medical transcription, you greatly simplify workflow. What was once ten steps can be reduced to five. This allows you to better meet 24-hour and even 12-hour turnaround time, but also realize soft cost savings that can be very meaningful. And ultimately, shorten your accounts receivable cycle.

Reason 10: Take Advantage of a Single-source Medical Transcription Solution

When you have to piece together your own medical transcription process, the entire weight of the solution is on your shoulders. Researching the right technology, platform, equipment, and recruits. Working closely with IT, accounts receivable, and HR. Squeezing every penny in your budget. Struggling with HIPAA compliance. And dealing with the day-to-day problems, cost surprises, and emergencies that constantly crop up. By outsourcing your medical transcription process to a single source, you free yourself of the burden, save substantial money by consolidating all your services with one provider, and still maintain complete control of the process --- while ensuring all necessary standards of quality, turnaround time, and HIPAA compliance are met.

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Benefits of Medical Transcription

If you`ve been putting off outsourcing your medical transcription, then this is the post for you. We`re going to look at some of the benefits of getting professionals to take on that onerous task of dealing with typing up all those medical reports.

• Lower cost. If you do the math, you`ll find that having a medical transcriptionist on the payroll ends up being far more expensive than hiring out your work only when you need it.
• Easier. There`s nothing easier than talking and having someone else type it all up! By outsourcing, you`ll be getting professionals to do this work and it will all be proofed.
• Faster. Most doctors and other medical professionals find that medical transcription services are far faster for getting medical documents done than they would be on their own.
• More free time. By outsourcing this type of mundane work, you will be able to get more done on other tasks.

Medical transcription is something that you can really benefit from. If you choose the right transcription service, you`ll save money and time and still get top quality work done.

A diploma in medical transcription helps aspiring medical transcriptionists to improve comprehension of American accent. A Medical Transcription Course also increases the working capability of a transcriptionist. As graduates from any background can opt for this course, it is necessary for them to be acquainted with medical terminology, the scope of which this course provides.

The increasing demand for skilled medical billing and coding specialists can be attributed to the growing use of medical transcription software for healthcare organizations around the globe. Medical transcription software has slowly replaced the need for manual transcription services that could take up to a week to turnaround a dictation; today’s innovative software and technologies are designed to automate the dictation-to-reporting process so that the final product can be retrieved within 24-48 hours.

Some of the key benefits of medical transcription software include:

1. Easy voice capture and speech recognition capabilities. This makes it easier for the medical transcriptionist to capture the doctor’s dictation with utmost accuracy. Doctors can submit their dictation via phone or other recording device to make the audio file available to the coding specialist, and the voice capture technologies can make this process more accurate than conventional methods.

2. Medical spell checking and dictionaries. Since a coding specialist may not understand medical terminology and phrases, a medical spellchecking function may be incorporated into the medical transcription software. This also makes the data capture more accurate and can save time in the grammar and spellcheck process.

3. Easy document distribution. After the report has passed quality control and is ready for submission, medical transcription software can make documents available in a variety of formats. The report can be synchronized to a doctor’s handheld device or computer, or simply sent in electronic form for easy printing.

4. Supports a variety of audio and video formats. Medical transcription software has been designed to support several audio and video formats so that doctors using different types of technology can benefit from the services. With fewer limitations, more healthcare organizations can begin to use medical transcription services with ease.

5. Quick and simple editing interface. If errors are present or a medical transcriptionist needs to go back and edit certain areas of a document, the software allows for simple editing with a text editing tool and keyboard short cuts. This reduces turnaround time and improves the accuracy of all reports.

6. Time code stamp functions. Medical billing and coding specialists can make use of time stamp functions on all their data with a touch of a button. This also reduces turnaround time and provides better, more accurate data for the doctor.

7. Integration with many healthcare systems and programs. Doctors and physicians can access data easily with today’s innovative medical transcription software and platforms. This reduces time for finding and retrieving data so that reports are readily available, at their fingertips.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of working from home, especially with medical transcription is the ability to have more time with the family. Medical transcription does not require the punching of a time clock. All the client (transcription company or medical establishment) wants is their final product and it is up to you to create your work schedule to ensure that your work is done in a timely, accurate manner.

Working from home also means that there are no expenses for gasoline or wear and tear of your vehicle and you can take as much work as you want or as little as you want, based on your home schedule. The companies that outsource to you benefit as well with less overhead which means no paying salaries that would have to include vacation time, sick days and insurance costs. It is a win-win situation for both sides of the home based medical transcription equation.

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Is Your Medical Transcription Service Helpful?

How helpful is your medical transcription service? What happens if you run into a problem and need some help resolving it, if you have a question about their service, or just need to know how much longer your transcription will take?

The support provided by medical transcription service is something that you will want to test out ahead of time. Write them an email asking a question that cannot be answered by anything on the website or try the live chat. In general, the more options the medical transcription service gives you for contacting them, the better.

It´s impossible to know just what situations might occur that you will need to talk to the medical transcription service, but it is an area that you definitely need to consider when making a decision. Often a frustration or misunderstanding can easily be cleared up with just a quick phone call. However, if you are put on hold for an hour or don´t get a reasonable response to your email, you will find that you end up more frustrated than you started out!

Check the support system that your medical transcription service has in place and be sure that it is one you will be happy to use. If you hate talking on the phone, be sure that they offer email support and if you just can´t wait for an email, then look for a company that will also provide live chat.

Transdyne offers Transcription Help to Private Physicians, Clinics and Transcription Vendors and our Transcription Partner program page outlines our method of alliances with Transcription Vendors. Sirius BPO Services accepts Medical dictations in various formats such as .dss, .wav, .dvf etc from Digital Recorders and from Dial-in Telephone dictations. Dictations from Digital recorders are generally of better quality audio to decipher and which results in better quality of Medical transcription. When physicians use Phone-in dictations, they can continue to use their provider and give access to the Phone-in server from where we can download the dictations for Medical transcription services. Otherwise they can opt to use our Phone-in service to deliver the dictations.

The advantages of medical transcription outsourcing are numerous. The primary advantage is the time gained. In hospitals and clinics, the patients' physical reports, operative reports, consultation notes, laboratory reports, discharge summaries, and many more are outsourced to medical transcription service providers. These files are usually voice files dictated by doctors and other healthcare professionals. Medical transcriptionists transcribe these files and send them back via secure e-mail. Medical transcription outsourcing allows hospitals, clinics and healthcare personnel to focus more on their core activities.

Medical transcriptionists are highly skilled in advanced medical terminology and have a thorough understanding of the procedures, policies, and documentation rules required for the production of medical records. Majority of the transcriptionists working in medical transcription companies are graduates in biological sciences. This allows them to understand the terminologies and vocabulary used by a doctor. Thus error free reports can be prepared maintaining high accuracy. Many companies offer medical transcription outsourcing in lower cost.

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