Saturday, January 30, 2010

Cardiology Transcription- Using Six Sigma to Improve the Quality and Productivity

Whenever a heart patient visits his or her cardiologist, all the medical observations are dictated, stored and sent to a cardiology transcription services provider. Here a transcriptionist listens to the voice file and converts into a computer text file. This electronic file is sent back to the cardiologist for future reference.

But this system is prone to errors in spite of quality norms followed by the transcription services provider. The voice quality of the file may not be proper and it requires the transcriptionist to spend more time to grasp it or there might be errors while converting the voice into electronic text. This all reduces the overall efficiency of transcription process and puts the lives of the patient at risks due to errors in the medical documentation process.

This is where the Six Sigma can play a pivotal role in enhancing the efficiency of the cardiology transcription process by eliminating the recurrent errors that inhibit the productivity of the process. The Six Sigma is basically a quality control program that consists of the management and technical strategies. The management aspect of the strategy sees to fact that all the set goals are realized successfully and that the success is sustained over a period of time. The technical part of the program ensures that process is analyzed sharply and all the bumps or shortcomings are effectively removed by adopting a strategy that measures, analyzes, improves and controls the quality of the cardiology transcription process.

As cardiology transcription involves daily conversion of data on a voluminous scale, it very difficult to keep track on each and every mistake committed in spite of well trained transcriptionist and a quality control department, which oversees the overall quality of the process. Looking minutely into each and every mistake is not possible as it slows down the whole process and hinders the timely dispatch of the transcribed reports back to the cardiologist.

The Six Sigma provides great solution to this problem by creating an inbuilt safety mechanism in the process. This automatically removes the errors from transcription process, like voice quality, conversion of voice into text or any other errors, which slows down the process and same time reduces the quality of final output. Thus Six Sigma is a boon for cardiologist, heart patients and transcription services provider as it lowers turn around time and increases the accuracy of the transcribed report. The transcription services provider, benefits from increase in productivity due to better quality and at same time, cardiologist is able to provide better and timely treatment to his or her patients.

Six Sigma governs the productivity and quality of transcription process.

Jason Gaya

For more information on Cardiology transcription, visit, www.cardioscribes.com

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