The healthcare industry has evolved when it comes to recording patient data. Most healthcare service providers have a hectic schedule, and keeping up with the patient’s information needs attention to detail. Missing minor patient information leads to wrong diagnoses. So, the right diagnosis needs accurate patient data. However, physicians, surgeons, and healthcare providers are under an obligation to protect patient information. This is where medical transcription becomes crucial.
Medical transcription makes recording and tracking medical activities like diagnosis, follow-ups, and check-ups easier. A medical transcriptionist documents everything that a healthcare service provider dictates and what the patient explains. Medical transcription is vital in improving collaborations between doctors, nurses, healthcare providers, and patients. Let’s explore some of the major ways in which medical transcription improves healthcare collaboration.
How Does Accurate Medical Transcription Promote Healthcare Collaboration?
Recently, the healthcare industry has seen rapid digital transformations. However, medical transcription is still in demand due to a large number of patients and fewer doctors attending them.
Doctors must manage time and accuracy while diagnosing patients, which means every detail should be recorded. This is where medical transcription allows doctors to record, monitor, refer, and use patient information anytime during the treatment.
Here are some other key benefits of medical transcription.
- Better HIPAA compliance
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a data regulation standard that healthcare organizations and professionals must comply with. The data privacy standard provides a guideline on the usage and disclosure of patients’ health information. Under this law, no sensitive patient health information can be disclosed without a patient’s consent.
Medical transcription provides a better understanding of what data is shared and used by healthcare professionals or organizations. A HIPAA-compliant transcription service helps doctors by providing multi-layer security and a data center that monitors the system round the clock.
In other words, patient data is far more secure with a HIPAA-compliant medical transcription. They use encryptions to ensure that the data-at-rest and data-at-motion are secure from hackers.
For medical practitioners and healthcare organizations, HIPAA-compliant medical transcription become crucial because it helps improve patients’ trust.
- Enhanced diagnosis
Diagnosing patients need a thorough understanding of the symptoms. Doctors with complex surgeries at hand are required to refer to patients’ previous consultation data. For example, if a neurosurgeon wants to plan a brain surgery, they need to access specific details for pre-operative assessments. It may include data on different symptoms like headaches, nausea, vomiting, confusion, transient ischemic attacks (TIA) history, and the current medications being administered.
Similarly, medical transcription also enables doctors to bring other healthcare professionals on board. Other participating healthcare professionals like anesthetists, surgery assistants, nurses, and lab assistants can also access patients’ details through transcription. They can even use Artificial Intelligence by feeding the transcription to algorithms that can suggest specific practices and help check surgery’s feasibility.
- Ease of data access
Medical transcription allows healthcare organizations and service providers to record hours of service. For example, a psychiatrist charges patients per session based on service hours. In such a case, a medical transcription acts as the record for hours of service.
Outsourcing medical transcription services can aid healthcare organizations in easing the complex documenting and recording process of patients’ data. These services are carried out through experienced transcriptionists that can save a lot of time and effort on an organization’s behalf.
Doctors and nurses have recording devices or a transcription app on their mobiles which helps them capture critical patient information. When they are busy attending to numerous patients throughout the day, transcription act as a go-to database. They can simply access the patient’s history, past illness, symptoms, and other side effects of any earlier treatment through transcription.
- Quicker claims
Medical insurance claims need patients’ work proof regarding healthcare professionals’ services. In other words, you need to provide evidence of a doctor’s consultation, treatment, surgeries, hospital admissions, and more.
Organizations can leverage medical transcription to provide proof for claims. They can also use EMR Transcription Services to ensure comprehensive documentation and capture assessment records required for the insurance claiming process.
- Medical history
The medical history of the patient is crucial. Many patients may have a recurring illness and require doctors to track the symptoms to earlier diagnoses. Medical transcription can help healthcare service providers and doctors quickly access the disease history of any patient without the hassle of going through several pages of documentation.
- Reference point
There are patients with critical illnesses who require special treatment. Such treatments may not be available for patients in their home country. So, they travel abroad for treatments. However, documentation is essential for patients seeking medical treatment abroad.
Conclusion
The role of transcription in the patient’s data maintenance and accessibility is exceptional. Many healthcare providers use transcriptionists to amplify their data accuracy. Today, modern technology allows doctors to integrate voice assistants with medical transcription to create intelligent healthcare recommendations.
Medical transcription can be a reference point for doctors and healthcare organizations (that are based abroad) for treatments. It will allow healthcare professionals to access earlier symptoms, causes of illness, medicines prescribed, and more. This reduces the complexity of the whole diagnosis process that patients may face abroad.
