This is an update to the blog, “National Medical Transcriptionist Week, May 17-23”
Each year, the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) observes a week in May as National Medical Transcriptionist Week. This year, May 19-25 will be observed as Medical Transcriptionist Week. This week following National Hospital Week from May 12-18, celebrates the role of medical transcriptionists in managing key medical records. Medical transcriptionists or healthcare documentation specialists (HDS) play a key role in supporting clinicians with precise documentation, which helps them provide quality care for patients. Professional medical transcription outsourcing companies also take part in this event to highlight their skilled resources’ important role in assisting doctors in all medical specialties receive accurate patient records. With the introduction of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), though transcriptionists do not have to manually transcribe the recorded notes, they have to edit the documents produced for medical accuracy. They audit and correct medical records to ensure accuracy and completeness.
This year’s theme for the week is “Success is a Journey.” This week-long event helps to recognize the contributions made by these healthcare documentation specialists in ensuring complete and error-free patient health records. To promote this campaign in 2019, AHDI recommends organizations / businesses to
- Get credentialed, become a mentor and help someone get credentialed
- Invest in membership and invite healthcare colleagues to join AHDI
- Take advantage of member benefits, continuing education, and networking opportunities
- Invite a friend or colleague to their Healthcare Documentation Integrity Virtual Conference (HDIVC) this August
- Share their message with healthcare colleagues far and wide
AHDI has announced that this celebration will be newly titled as Healthcare Documentation Integrity Week beginning in 2020.
Healthcare Documentation Specialists – They Are the Unsung Heroes
Medical documentation specialists such as medical transcriptionists, editors, QA specialists and auditors of clinician-created documentation are valuable resources and assets to clinicians as they protect healthcare documents, focusing mainly on patient safety and risk management. Knowledge in healthcare privacy and data security, they follow best documentation practices. A professional medical transcriptionist will also possess certain key skills such as – good knowledge of medical terminology related to the specialty they are trained in, ability to use correct grammar with correct punctuation, better typing and analytical skills, capable of following written instructions, sound listening skills and more.
There is no doubt that a human interface is needed to make new technologies work optimally. Healthcare documentation specialists can ensure quality patient care documentation, by clearly understanding the requirements of HIPAA and HITECH. As editors, they now scrutinize each patient record, monitoring documents for wrong patient/wrong content (demographic mismatches), wrong provider name, wrong dates of service, incorrect work types, medication dosage errors, right/left, male/female inconsistencies, medical contradictions as well as other missing elements and speech recognition errors. Reliable medical transcription services help health systems document a wide range of reports including medical histories, discharge summaries, physical examination reports, operating room reports, diagnostic imaging studies, consultation reports, autopsy reports, referral letters and other documents.
