The technical team of the company in coordination with the IT staff of the clinic enables the secure HIPAA compliant VPN connectivity, and using a secure password the medical transcribers can login and document the physician narrations read into the centralized voice recording system.
If the EMR application that is in use by a health care facility allows for Local Area Network (LAN) connectivity, the transcription companies set it up in a similar manner as the VPN. The EMR applications that are web-based, meaning a browser based login are amongst the least complicated, in as so far as the technicalities are concerned. The medical transcribers log into the EMR application website and access the physician dictations to document them.
There are in numerous EMR applications available to health care facilities, some of which are specialty specific, and consist of forms or templates that are relevant to the practice. The transcription companies have trained medical transcribers that are able to document the specialty reports using the forms or templates built within these applications.
In most of the EMR applications the built-in voice recognition software has been a big disappointment, because physicians do not want to loose their valuable time in training the software to recognize their voice, even after the training process some physicians have quality issues, such as misspells of medical terms and procedures, in the automated reports.
Many health care facilities are in fact are keen to partner with medical transcription companies that are able to provide the service through VPN, LAN or Web-Based log in. The high costs of running an in-house transcription division is one of the main reasons, health-care facilities are looking at other alternatives. Each in-house medical transcriber costs the health care facility $ 14 to $ 15 an hour, and added to that are other overheads such as transcription hardware/software, and this cost the clinics 35¢ to 38¢ for documenting a 65 character line.
The medical transcription companies on the other hand are able to provide the service at just 8.5¢ to 9.5¢, so the difference in costs is one of the major reasons for the facilities to look for viable alternatives, after all the health care reforms are all about lowering costs in the health care industry.
