Outsourcing Transcription Work - White Paper

Transcription is basically defined as any typing of oral recordings (intelligent verbatim transcription) – these days on a digital recorder, often supplied by a company called Olympus and recorded onto a CD or digital file.

The file is then sent to a transcriber (typist) who uses software to turn the recorded work into a manuscript. This is the transcript and hence we get the word transcription.

Transcription has become fairly big business and a lot of companies and firms are experimenting with outsourcing transcription work.

General Dictation
There are two sorts of outsourced transcription work, the first being day to day, general dictation by managers, fee earners and professionals and these tend to be mainly letters, memos and reports. There are big enterprises in the UK and the USA that outsource the typing work to call centre operations in India and South Africa. These operations can be running many hundreds of thousands of recordings at any one time and the turnaround rate is usually within hours.

The cost of outsourcing day to day transcription work is usually very good and can safe companies considerably, though not as one much as one would expect. Firstly, a secretary on site can often be handling lots of different things at any one time, including enquiries, telephone calls and some junior fee earning managerial tasks. A secretary offshore in India can simply type a letter.

Recordings – Interviews & Research
The second sort of transcription is the longer recordings of interviews, reports, consultations and conferences.

These tend to be bulk orders and will be a number of tapes, CDs or digital files recorded of discussions, meetings or straightforward one to one interviews - the transcription is simply a full record of the recording.

Court transcription services are a good example of this, although most courts have their own select list of transcribers who will simply do court work and nothing else on a set contract with their machinery in the courtrooms.

The second type of recording (ie: conferences and meetings) tends to be very time consuming, and often companies & organisations will look to outsource this so that they can free up staff internally to deal with other work.

A good example of this is solicitors firms where a police station interview needs transcribing; usually a secretary would have to do it. However a secretary transcribing a 30 minute police station interview requires about four hours of time. Four hours of a secretary’s day would be very costly to a solicitor when the secretary is also taking telephone calls, general typing and admin work.

Another example would be a company who had an employment tribunal hearing and need a recording of a disciplinary meeting transcribing. The cost of transcribing a disciplinary meeting again can be measured in terms of the time it would take someone from a department to sit down and type out the whole meeting. This means that for every 20 minutes of recording, somebody has got to sit for probably in the region of about three hours to transcribe. Three hours of somebody’s time to do this is often too expensive for the company and usually somebody volunteers to do it, realises how hard the work is within about five minutes and says they won’t do it with the work being outsourced at that stage!

These are the reasons why transcription has become so popular to be outsourced – it frees up staff time and also gets rid of a very unpopular task that can be turned around quickly and effectively offsite by experienced transcribers.

TRANSDYNE Transcription Services is an online cost-effective outsourcing operation that is cost effective for companies and organisations to have work transcribed, whether for small or large orders. The company regularly deals with universities, plc’s and SME’s across the US. Sphere: Related Content

Outsourcing vs. In-house Medical Transcription

Effectively, outsourcing is the modern day progression of an idea that has always existed in trade, but has found new application with the advancement and adoption of new technologies.

Applied to the area of medical services, as healthcare organizations and providers grow in size and operations, it becomes imperative that their focus be directed to their core activities (patient care) while non-core functions (like transcription and billing) are contracted out or outsourced to organizations which specialize in that particular function. This allows medical providers to do things a lot more efficiently and enables them to do more with less.

With the daily challenges of managing patient information and stringent regulations, managing a full medical transcription staff also puts a strain on the time and resources of a medical organization. Outsourcing medical transcription work in such a scenario is not only immensely beneficial, but also comes with a few other advantages that are not possible with in-house transcription. Listed below are a few of these benefits.

1 Lower Capital Investment & Equipment Expenses

When you outsource your medical transcription requirements, you no longer have to own or maintain a dictation system, a typing platform or worry about upgrading your equipment. Your capital expenses on maintenance with the average maintenance agreement can cost upwards of 10% of equipment costs, annually. Maintaining an in-house transcription team also places certain office equipment and space expenses which are removed by outsourcing.

2 Turnaround time guarantees & Volume fluctuations

While the number of documents generated by a healthcare organization averages out across months, on a daily basis document volume can fluctuate heavily because of dictation frequency and patient volume. This not only increases management overhead but also delays transcription more often than not. With a medical transcription vendor, you are provided with guarantees on turnaround time so that patient documents are never delayed. This removes the need for you to set document priority based on the criticality and urgency of a document and ensures that all documents are available when you need them.

3 Reduced management overheads

The amount of time needed to manage medical transcription in-house can be a large overhead when you consider tasks like managing dictations, allocating transcription work, setting document priority and maintaining archives of audio and documents. Outsourcing reduces these overheads effectively improving efficiency in other areas.

4 Benefits from economies of scale

Transcription firms usually handle dictations from several hundreds and sometimes thousands of medical professionals on a daily basis. Because of the volumes they handle, transcription of documents is streamlined with the implementation of commercial workflow systems, set workflow practices and quality assurance processes. These practices improve quality while reducing costs. More often than not, these cost benefits are passed on to customers reducing your transcription expense while improving quality.

5 Online Documents and Archives

The advent of online medical transcription and associated document management systems, in the last few years has resulted in a number of web based tools that simplify organization and management of documents. In-house transcription requires a painstaking system of distributing and archiving reports generated on a daily basis. Shifting to an outsourced transcription solution usually comes with a free online document management system that removes a number of these document management overheads. These free systems provide a simple a number of secure document management features in an easy-to-use interface. Apart from removing the IT costs associated with owning and maintaining such systems, they result in a number of staff efficiency gains.

6 Lower direct labor costs

Hiring transcribers as full time employees adds to your direct labor costs in terms of salaries, payroll benefits and payroll taxes, increasing the total cost of running your organization. Outsourcing removes a large number of these costs.

We have gone over the efficiency and quality benefits that accompany outsourced medical transcription solutions. We also touched on the broad cost benefits associated with medical transcription outsourcing. Let us now break down some of these expenses to get a clearer picture. The actual amounts spent on each of the below expenses vary from organization to organization.

If you have done the calculation above, it becomes apparent that if you do your medical transcription within the organization, wages constitute only a percentage of your total cost.

When you outsource your transcription the rest of the overheads mentioned above are managed by the transcription provider who takes advantage of economies of scale.

Other bonuses like web-based document management systems and support for a number of features and options, contribute towards making medical transcription outsourcing an invaluable and essential tool that helps a focused Medical Service Organization devote its time to its core function, that of Patient Care.

Sphere: Related Content

Outsourcing Transcription: What Are the Driving Forces?

Medical transcription is accelerating rapidly in virtually every area. Volume, line count, productivity demands, investment costs, managerial requirements, industry regulations, staffing pressures, physician expectations, process complexity—all these burdens are increasing at an overwhelming pace. For these reasons and more, a growing number of medical facilities are transferring their transcription services to external companies.

The driving forces behind outsourcing can be divided into three basic areas: turnaround, technology, and management.

Turnaround
The most clear-cut reason for outsourcing is increasing productivity and turnaround time (TAT). Not too many years ago, a TAT of 48 to 72 hours was common and acceptable. Those days are gone. In the modern world, physicians and patients expect complete medical records to be available within hours of dictation. Healthcare facilities also have a strong financial motivation to ensure quick TATs due to the billing cycle’s dependency on completed transcription. In addition, JCAHO requirements and other regulations have also added pressure to increase TAT.

The ability to meet strict TAT demands is increasingly difficult for even the largest hospital chains. The primary reason is staffing. The number of qualified medical transcriptionists (MTs) entering the job market in the United States is decreasing every year. In fact, there are more MTs retiring than who are joining the profession. Add growing demands to a shrinking workforce and it makes for an extremely difficult situation.

Assuming a healthcare facility is able to recruit an adequate number of MTs, there is the problem of fluctuating volume. The maximum capacity MTs can accommodate remains constant, but the number of transcription files can vary dramatically. Many hospitals find themselves paying massive overtime during busy periods while still failing to meet TAT requirements. Meanwhile, the same hospitals are paying MTs to remain idle during slow periods.

By outsourcing transcription work to a large medical transcription service organization (MTSO), a facility will be reasonably assured of steady productivity and a consistent TAT on all transcription files regardless of any fluctuations in volume. Furthermore, pricing is based on the number of lines transcribed. Rates will not increase with volume, nor will you pay for any MTs not actively working on your files.

Technology
In addition to MT salaries (and the salaries of their supervisors), healthcare facilities must also account for the cost of transcription technology. Having the right hardware and software is critical for optimizing productivity, but identifying the “best” technology is an extraordinarily difficult process—especially considering it is a perpetually moving target. Which new applications and upgrades are worth investing in? The answer varies from hospital to hospital, doctor to doctor, and worktype to worktype.

Speech recognition can be a valuable tool in some areas—radiology, for example—but it produces limited results in others. Some doctors will benefit from handheld PDA dictation capability that automatically matches patient schedule and/or admission, discharge, transfer to the dictation file, while others will be more comfortable using more traditional dictation methods. Some facilities will use the full range of capabilities allowed by their transcription software, while others require only a small number of its resources. Uncertainty leads many facilities to pay for unnecessary technology.

Avoiding obsolescence is another major concern. Rapid advancements in software increase the risk that an expensive new application will be quickly outdated, and the life span of new hardware seems to shrink every year. Also, system maintenance can consume a great deal of time and capital.

Maintaining top-of-the-line equipment and software for every step of the transcription process would be cost prohibitive for almost any medical facility, even assuming the IT staff has the expertise to select and maintain the ideal technologies. An MTSO, however, is able to take advantage of industry expertise and economies of scale to consistently identify and incorporate the best, new technology.

Partnering with an MTSO usually ensures that transcription services will be performed on state-of-the-art hardware and software. Plus, a facility will be able to pick and choose which technological capabilities are right for its needs and budget, rather than being forced to install a complete system with capabilities it will never use.

Management
Medical transcription is a complex and unique area of expertise within the healthcare industry. The process, protocols, and technology involved are highly specialized to the task. With 24/7 service being the norm for medical transcription, healthcare facilities are finding it difficult to keep qualified MT supervisors on the job around the clock.

Transcription requires active management and strict quality assurance. It is necessary to have managers with a thorough understanding of the medical transcription field. Managers must oversee MT training, develop appropriate compensation packages, monitor transcription quality levels, evaluate process problems and improvements, and other specialized tasks. This is in addition to standard human resources concerns such as recruitment, sick days, turnover, etc.

Too often these responsibilities fall on the health information professional, a position that has grown increasingly challenging as job responsibilities continue to grow. Without the necessary transcription background or time required to properly manage an MT workforce, productivity and efficiency may suffer. MTSOs specialize in the transcription process and are able to alleviate the burden of MT management from facility administrators.

Conclusion
In the past, healthcare facilities have been concerned about instability and interruptions in the flow of transcription files when dealing with an outside company. Today, transcription outsourcing is an established industry with proven leaders. As healthcare administrators seek new solutions to their transcription needs, the advantages of outsourcing become increasingly apparent.

Growing volume is making it increasingly difficult for healthcare facilities to achieve aggressive turnaround times on their own—especially as the MT workforce continues to shrink. Furthermore, advances in transcription technology require capital investments that many healthcare facilities are unwilling to make because of costs and uncertainty. In addition, managing the MT staff requires a level of expertise that is often impossible for administrators who are in the business of overall patient care, not transcription alone.
These forces are driving modern medical facilities to seek partnerships with outsourcing companies that specialize in and optimize the transcription process.

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

Why Opt for Outsourced Transcription?

Outsourcing transcription services is an ideal way to handle transcription, dictation and typing needs while minimizing service costs, capital expenditures, and turnaround time.

Online outsourcing means that transcriptionists no longer need to be on-site, or even in proximity to, the businesses employing their services. The best outsourcing transcription companies provide online dictation and transcription services (including digital audio transcription, cassette transcriptions, all varieties of hospital transcription, legal transcription, corporate transcription, medical transcription etc.). And a well-equipped outsource transcription company is able to take advantage of time zone differences and, in some cases, lower labor costs, to deliver low cost transcription services and dictation at extremely high turnaround rates.

By outsourcing transcription services to Capital Typing, you will get the following advantages:

• Technical and functional superiority over your competitors – without any capital investment;
• Minimization of on-site transcription staff related expenses;
• Elimination of expenses associated with the physical maintenance of office space for transcription services;
• Minimization of costs related to the acquisition of transcription software (and training on-site transcriptionists to use it);
• Improved time-zone advantage for the completion of transcription services;
• Online access to status reports, transcription and dictation retrieval;
• Security of transcripts and voice recordings (secure data transmission and secure FTP access)
• Most important, outsourcing transcription to a reliable, low-cost transcription company like Transdyne will give you the time to focus on your principal field of competence, thus enhancing your business’s productivity.

Outsourcing your dictation and transcription requirements to Transdyne is, without a doubt, the answer to your transcription and dictation needs. We employ trained, skilled professional transcriptionists from all over the U.S., and direct a group of partners from around the nation. Our clients benefit from the most efficient, accurate transcription service offered by any transcription company nation-wide.

Sphere: Related Content

Outsourcing Transcription To Save Costs

With the increase in demand to keep a record of the medical documents, many developed countries have now started to outsource medical transcription work to developing countries. The profits earned through medical transcription outsourcing services are constantly increasing in the US market.It is basically to save on the costs that developed countries prefer to outsource these services. Not only is the labor in developing countries cheap but also the currency rates of these countries are cheaper as compared to the developed countries like US.

In the past medical and business transcription was performed by in house based employees. This means that the institution not only had to pay salaries, health care benefits, vacation and sick pay for their employees, they also had the expense of the physical space and equipment needs. Hospitals and other institutions have found that outsourcing of their transcription needs eliminates some of these internal management responsibilities and costs.

Looking for ways to cut costs has become a way of life in most medical offices and institutions. One very efficient way to reduce expenditures has been found to be the outsourcing of medical transcription services.Most institutions pay on an average 28 to 36 percent more for their in house transcription then they would pay for the same if it was outsourced. Studies done in the past have found that a production based transcriptionist working in her or his home has a cost of nearly 37 percent less per character than an in house transcriptionist.

Another consideration of outsourcing transcription is accuracy of work and turn around time. Even with on site transcriptionists many hospitals have physician complaints regarding the quality and accuracy of the transcription and the turn around time of their dictations. Turn around time is directly related to the productivity of the worker. It was found that on site transcriptionists have many more disruptions and a much lower production rate when compared to outsourced transcriptionists. The on site transcription production rate is around 39 percent less than production based and home based transcription production rates.

At the completion of a nearly two year study it was found that hospitals and other institutions could save as much as 33 - 38 percent a year utilizing outsourced transcriptions services.

Outsourcing will also help you improve income in your department as you save a lot on costs of medical transcriptionists. Last but not least, you also save a lot of overhead cost as you do not have to pay for any employee insurance and other such added expenses of having permanent employees. So, whether outsourcing for MT services is good or bad depends on your individual perspective more than anything else.

Sphere: Related Content