The success of any organization is based on being able to focus on the core business and outsource all other activities that aren’t part of the core business. The core business of a healthcare facility is that of providing quality healthcare. All other activities are support functions. They play an essential role in achieving the core objective, but might not be part of the core competency of the healthcare facility.
One particular activity is medical transcription, which is the method of documenting the patient-healthcare professional encounter. What’s the significance of patient medical records in the healthcare process?
Patient records play an essential part in these:
- Patient treatment
- Permanent Patient records
- Referrals to other doctors
- Evidence in case there is malpractice suits
- Coding, billing and insurance claims
- Satisfaction of regulatory norms
You can observe that medical transcription plays a critical role in major regions of healthcare like quality of care, diagnosis and in the receivables cycle by creating patient medical records.IT-Berater Düsseldorf
What role does Information Technology (IT) play in transcription?
With the evolution of the method of patient record creation from the manual to the virtual world, Information Technology plays a critical role at every stage of the method like:
- Collections of patient-healthcare professional encounter data.
- Transmission of data to the transcriptionists
- The transcription process
- Transmission of transcribed files to the healthcare professionals
- Archiving of files for future reference
- HIPAA and HITECH compliance
- Integration with EMR systems.
The whole process needs Information technology at every stage to help make the process quicker and secure. Executing transcription in-house would require that the healthcare facility have massive investment in Information technology to enable all these functions. It would involve investments in servers for uploading dictation, secure file transfer protocols to distribute work to and collect work from transcriptionists, distribution network for report distribution and powerful archiving to trace dictations, work-in-progress and finished transcripts.
The straightforward step of outsourcing the entire process of creating patient medical records must a technologically savvy company can eliminate the sum total burden of investment in Information technology. These valuable resources could then be put to higher use.
Explore the Field of Health Information Technology
The healthcare industry keeps growing faster than ever, and growing with it is the necessity for trained professionals in the field of information technology. With advances in medicine and technology, digital record keeping and data basing have grown to be fundamental elements to modern healthcare facilities.
Based on statistics held by the United States Bureau of Labor, job prospects for professional in medical information technology field are likely to be on the list of fastest growing for another decade. Furthermore, technicians have been in constant demand by employers, making IT professionals in medical industry invaluable. Wages for technicians averaged at $40,610 in 2008, and those holding degrees from accredited universities earned even more.
Healthcare technicians perform a number of duties relating to organization records handling. Their skills are necessary to efficient patient care. Some of these duties include compiling medical information like medical history, current symptoms, examination results, diagnostic tests, treatment methods, and past healthcare services provided. Workers in this field also organize and manage medical data and ensure the product quality and accuracy of data.
In addition to careful management of data, technicians are responsible for understanding and using a number of advanced equipment and technologies. Technicians are actually proficient with electronic health records, or EHR. With this sort of software, technicians maintain and analyze each of a facilities data. Professionals often work to improve the grade of data management, and contribute to greater quality in overall patient care.
Professionals in medical information technology field may hold an associates degree, or higher. Programs in the field are given at a number of field, and typically cover a broad range of topics in healthcare and computer systems. At the associate’s level, graduates can expect an introductory amount of familiarity with these areas.