Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Understanding Medical Transcription

Medical transcription has come a long way from the manual typewriter to modern day computer. The transcription process is about converting a dictation into a text format that can be stored and retrieved as per convenience. It requires a skilled person who is known as a transcriptionist to accurately convert the recorded medical dictation into an electronic text, which can be saved as a file in the computer.

When ever a patient visits the doctor for a health check up, the concerned doctor after medical examination records the all the observations, which are later dictated into a hand held cassette player or a telephone that is connected to the central server of the hospital. From here the recorded voice is sent to the transcription services provider, where a transcriptionist attentively listens to the recorded voice and starts to convert into written text.

It is important that the medical transcription is highly accurate because it involves the safety of the patient. Any error in dictation or transcription can pose a serious risk to life of the patient. Hence a doctor speaks slowly and clearly in the recording instrument and on the other hand the transcriptionist carefully converts the recorded voice into an error free text. To do this, he or she needs to have some special qualities like:
  • Sharp listening ability and memory.
  • Good grammar and typing skills.
  • Understand foreign accent easily.
  • Well versed in medical terminology and able to update the knowledge.
  • Ability to sort, check and verify data accurately.
The medical transcription is boon to patients and doctors. There are many benefits that are associated with it and are mentioned below:
  • It considerably reduces the retrieval time for patient health data.

  • The medical facility is able to reduce infrastructure cost by outsourcing the work to qualified transcription services provider at a cheaper price.

  • The inclusion of HIPAA norms in medical transcription process has made it very safe and secure to transfer and store confidential patient health data.

  • The HIPAA regulations and high quality transcription procedures adopted ensure high accuracy of stored health data of patient that can be easily relied on by the doctors, forlater use.
In the end medical transcription is at highly skilled process that ensures that health records of all the patients are securely stored in an electronic form, which can be later retrieved by the doctor to treat the patient.

Medical transcription makes it easy for doctor to retrieve the data whenever needed.

To know more about benfits of transcription in Cardiology, visit www.cardioscribes.com