The success of any organization is based on to be able to pay attention to the core business and outsource all other activities which are not the main 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 may not be the main core competency of the healthcare facility.
One particular activity is medical transcription, which will be the method of documenting the patient-healthcare professional encounter. What’s the importance of patient medical records in the healthcare process?
Patient records play an essential part in the next:
- Patient treatment
- Permanent Patient records
- Referrals to other doctors
- Evidence in case of malpractice suits
- Coding, billing and insurance claims
- Satisfaction of regulatory norms
You can see that medical transcription plays an essential role in major areas 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 an essential 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 entire 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 every one of these functions. It’d 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 whole process of fabricating patient medical records needs to a technologically savvy service provider can eliminate the full total burden of investment in Information technology. These valuable resources could then be put to better use.
Explore the Field of Health Information Technology
The healthcare industry is growing faster than ever, and growing with it’s 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.
In accordance with statistics held by the United States Bureau of Labor, job prospects for professional in the information technology field are likely to be on the list of fastest growing for the following decade. Additionally, technicians have been in constant demand by employers, making IT professionals in the industry invaluable. Wages for technicians averaged at $40,610 in 2008, and those holding degrees from accredited universities earned even more.
Healthcare technicians perform many different duties concerning organization records handling. Their skills are necessary to efficient patient care. A few 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.
Along with careful management of data, technicians are accountable for understanding and using many different advanced equipment and technologies. Technicians are now actually proficient with electronic health records, or EHR. With this kind of software, technicians maintain and analyze all of a facilities data. Professionals often work to boost the caliber of data management, and contribute to greater quality in overall patient care.
Professionals in the information technology field may hold an associates degree, or higher. Programs in the field are offered at many different field, and typically cover a wide array of topics in healthcare and computer systems. At the associate’s level, graduates can get an introductory amount of understanding of the next areas.