Providing quality healthcare is a continuous process, involving constant endeavors to improve on quality of services while still maintaining profitability. The healthcare process is complex and therefore the operations of healthcare facilities immaterial of the size of the facility or the number of healthcare professionals working, is very complicated.

The healthcare process requires inputs from very various sources to meet the standards of quality healthcare of being safe, appropriate, timely, and cost effective. To this end healthcare facilities have to increase their focus on their core activity- that of providing quality healthcare and outsource the rest of the processes that are not part of their core business. One such activity that has a role to play in the healthcare process is medical transcription, which is the process of creating patient medical records from the narration of the healthcare professional regarding the patient- healthcare professional encounter. Outsourcing this activity can help the hospital/ clinic/ doctor streamline and improve their operations. Imedical Healthcare Solutions

How does outsourcing help streamline and improve operations?

Availing services from an experienced transcription vendor can help improve operations at several levels:

• By creating patient records on time: Patient records provide an important support to the treatment process by providing a summary of the patient’s medical history. Availing the services of an experienced vendor ensures that patient records are created on time. This not only supports doctors and support staff by providing a valuable diagnostic tool, but also helps in accelerating the reimbursement process.
• By accurate creation of transcripts: Availing specialized services ensures that the quality of patient records is maintained by accurately and comprehensively capturing all details. The outsourced service provider would be able to ensure maximum accuracy by having teams of trained transcriptionists to execute the work and also ensuring that all transcripts are put through a rigorous quality check process to minimize errors.
• By providing support for varying volumes of transcription requirement: The volume of support required is impossible to predict, as it depends on the inflow of patients at any given time. Outsourcing ensures that the accuracy and turnaround time are unaffected in spite of fluctuations in volume.
• By allowing healthcare professionals to retain familiar modes of dictation: Allowing healthcare professionals and support staff the flexibility to retain familiar modes of dictation ensures that they can optimize their time for maximum productivity.
• By providing regular job summaries: Keeping track of dictations, work in progress and transcripts can be a tedious and time consuming task, especially in healthcare facilities with high volumes. Outsourcing medical transcription can make managing transcription much easier by providing a job summary of the work enabling them to track of it.
• By enabling easy access to older transcripts: Many vendors archive the older transcripts after a certain period of time. The support staff at the healthcare facility can easily access these files as and when required using various search criteria.
• By providing diverse modes of document delivery: Experienced vendors ensure that transcripts are delivered to the clinic/ hospital/ doctors/ support staff in a secure and efficient mode through the mode specified by them.
• By reducing cost of medical transcription: Availing services from an outside entity results in a substantial savings on cost of transcription both direct and indirect. In fact outsourcing converts the fixed costs of creating patient medical records to variable cost restricted to the extent of usage of services.
• By providing technology that is easy to use: Outsourcing medical transcription provides software and tools for transcription that enables various features that benefit the healthcare facility and the healthcare professionals in various ways while still being easy to use.
• By enabling adoption of EMR: Transcription vendors enable the healthcare facilities to protect existing investments in EMR by providing HL7 interface.