Doctors, surgeons, nurses, and nurse practitioners have some of the most stressful and important jobs in the world. Not only do they have their patients’ lives in their hands, they’re urged to continue their education and constantly learn and grow to ensure they’re equipped with the latest knowledge and technology.

But aside from their day-to-day, healthcare providers are also required to keep diligent notes as part of the record-keeping process and HIPAA-compliance standards. Smaller providers employ an in-house transcriptionist to handle all recorded materials and transcribe them to a HIPAA-compliant format, but these professionals are few and far between - let alone always qualified to handle such an influx of material on a regular basis. Here’s why it’s important to choose your medical transcription provider with care:

The Importance of Reliable Medical Transcriptionists

There are plenty of reasons why medical transcription is an essential component to keeping your operating a well-tuned clock, but the following are considered to be iron-clad areas of importance:

Accuracy Above All Else

For doctors, physicians, and primary care providers, the importance of having reliable, accurate medical documentation cannot be stressed highly enough. As doctors treat patients, they need to have medical records they can trust so they can quickly and carefully assess a patient’s condition and situation to decide the best course of action and determine the proper treatment method going forward. Furthermore, it allows them to reference their previous treatment strategies and take follow-up measures to ensure the patient doesn’t relapse or worsen as a result of complications.

Healthcare is Becoming More Collaborative

Even if you visit a small clinic, it’s very rare that only one doctor or healthcare provider will focus on your case, making sharing of critical patient data an essential element to ensuring proper care. Especially if a case requires multiple specialists with expertise in different fields or disciplines, sharing information and collaboration is a vital role in the heart of a healthcare facility. That’s where medical transcriptionists come in. Their records provide important medical and treatment information between multiple practitioners to ensure communication is clear and concise, ensuring everyone is on the same page. These vital transcriptions help facilitate the flow of information between one doctor and the next, ensuring the proper diagnosis and treatment options are implemented - no matter the size of the team.

Maintains Communication Throughout the Facility

While doctors and specialists aren’t working with a patient, it falls to nursing and support staff to ensure the patient is cared for and receives the proper treatments. By having these accurate medical records, everyone in the treatment facility will have the same accurate information to keep the patient healthy and avoid complications or setbacks.

HIPAA Compliance

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a critical element of modern healthcare. It revolutionized medical record-keeping and compliance throughout the United States, but required a considerable overhaul of record-keeping departments and standardization of written communications. Not only do these records help ensure proper care is administered to the patient, they serve as the basis for legal arguments should any complications occur or a lawsuit is brought upon the medical provider.

Consistency for Insurance Purposes

Medical records carry tremendous importance. From ensuring consistent, proper care is delivered across an entire medical staff to protecting healthcare providers from lawsuits and legal battles, there’s considerable responsibility given to medical transcriptionists. Trusting them to create accurate, consistent, and HIPAA-compliant documentation of recorded materials isn’t just essential to the operations and care of your healthcare facility, it’s an important element of billing insurance companies for the cost of care administered. Medical records form the basis on which health insurance carriers are billed, meaning your facility won’t get paid without the right records.

Why Accuracy Matters - And Why Your In-House Transcriptionist May Not Be Enough

No matter the size or sophistication of your medical facility, accuracy in transcription of medical records is of the utmost importance. Even if you employ an in-house transcriptionist to convert your recorded materials to a text format, if you’re not achieving 100% accuracy, you may run into serious legal trouble should an issue occur during treatment. Even for standard medical care, losing sight of perfect accuracy in medical records can be a huge potential exposure for the entire organization, threatening not only the future of the facility but the very medical licenses held by the doctors and providers.

In order to produce highly-accurate and reliable medical transcription records, reports, and insurance invoices, your team must be skilled and trained as medical transcriptionists. Qualified transcriptionists are hard to find and even harder to train, making it difficult for smaller clinics and private practitioners to hire and retain talented employees. Even the smallest mistake can be a catastrophic blow to any medical organization, meaning you’ll need to carefully screen and test potential medical transcriptionists.

Trained medical transcriptionists undergo a formalized training process or certification from any of the following avenues:

- An associate degree from a community college
- Online medical transcription training courses
- Vocational medical transcription training courses
- Medical transcription certificates from a specialized program

In the era of service-based, online providers, finding a qualified medical transcriptionist with strict adherence to HIPAA standards is actually much easier than it's ever been. And with prices far below the overhead of hiring a full or part-time employee, it makes total sense to employ a third-party transcription provider to handle all of your organization’s sensitive medical records. HIPAA-certified and ready to sign the necessary NDA documents, professional transcription companies offer a vital element of the healthcare puzzle at a fraction of the cost of an in-house transcriptionist.

To learn more about hyper-accurate, cost-effective medical transcription services, contact Transcription Hub. Our team has extensive experience working in the healthcare and medical fields and is ready to partner with healthcare providers on a confidential, HIPAA-compliant basis and our rates meet or exceed industry lows. Find out more or get started on your project by using our automated uploading tool and streamline your medical transcription process today.