4 Best Practices to Maximize Efficiency in Dentistry Transcription

The health of the patients is the most crucial aspect of any medical practice, including dental practices. However, keeping track of and managing patient records is a challenge for many dental clinics. This might result in expensive errors such as misdiagnosing a condition or providing medication that may not be required. To streamline dental record keeping and increase office efficiency, dentists can use dentistry transcription services. Professional medical transcriptionists provide clear, accurate transcripts of the dentist’s audio recordings so that all details of the patient are always within reach.

Importance of Timely and Efficient Dental Transcription

When a patient visits you, you need to capture all information about his/her present and past medical conditions, medications that have been prescribed, reports, and tests. The best way to speed up this process is to have the patient interaction recorded and later transcribed by a professional transcriptionist. This record is an important part of the patient’s medical history that you can quickly access as and when necessary. Your billing and coding staff can use dental records that have been prepared systematically to speed up insurance claims processing and more easily obtain insurance reimbursement. Dental professionals can utilize the patient record as a reference for patient treatment, including warning indications that need to be investigated, with the help of accurate dentistry transcription. In the event of legal disputes, these records can be an invaluable asset. Therefore, accurate dental transcription is crucial for every dentist or dental office.

If you are planning to have in-house staff do the transcription, here are 4 effective ways in which you can improve efficiency of your dentistry transcription. In fact, these are best practices that a medical transcription company follows to ensure optimum transcription solutions for dentists:

1. 1. Use the right medical transcription software for dictation: The right software can help improve the efficiency of medical transcription.

• Such software is specifically designed for dental practitioners to achieve the highest efficiency in dental and clinical documentation.
• You can choose software that is compatible with your EHR, and it will enable you to keep your dictation document in sync with your EHR.
• Medical transcription software comes with voice capture and speech recognition capabilities. So, the transcriptionist can more easily and accurately capture the dentist’s dictation.
• The software supports a variety of audio and video file formats.
• Other significant features available are medical spell checking and dictionaries.
• Once the transcript is quality-checked and approved, the software can make the transcript available in the desired format. It can be synchronized to the dentist’s computer or handheld device, or sent for printing.

2. 2. Use state-of-the-art cloud-based computing: This facilitates safe storage as well as access of data. Cloud technology ensures safety with document transfer and helps meet HIPAA compliance when sending, sharing or retrieving voice and data files over the Internet. Moreover, this technology is scalable in keeping with your changing demands. Transcription becomes simpler to manage and carry out, and this increases the efficiency of your dental transcription. Since the cloud provider offers the necessary resources, dental practices get valuable cost savings and excellent ROI.

3. 3. Use artificial intelligence for efficiency and accuracy: AI or artificial intelligence is going to be increasingly used in all business sectors because it is the technology of the future. This technology comes with many advantages, and medical transcriptionists can produce more accurate and increased number of transcripts faster.

4. 4. Take measures to improve your TAT: This can be achieved through using transcription productivity tools such as Word Auto-Correct and Macro features.

• Apart from these, there are Word expander software such as Instant Text or Shorthand that can increase productivity considerably and speed up transcription turnaround time.
• Use high-quality headphones: This will help hear audio sounds clearly, and understand them easily. It will also help avoid having to replay the audio again and again to figure out inaudible words.
• Use a foot pedal to make work easier: You can have rewind, play/pause, and fast forward functions to improve efficiency and speed. Other functions you can have include slow down, jump, or next dictation among others.
• Improve ergonomic features in your office: This helps avoid discomfort while working, and thereby improve efficiency and productivity.

One of the best ways to streamline dental transcription is by outsourcing to a professional transcription vendor. It is one of the quickest and most secure means of managing your patient records.

• These transcription vendors have professional transcriptionists who are trained and are knowledgeable in dental terminologies, which enables them to produce error-free transcripts in a short period of time.
• They also ensure high level of patient data confidentiality and with access to transcripts quickly, dentists and other related staffs can print or distribute medical documents to multiple destinations through the internet.

For any dentist to provide the right care, it is important to have access to accurate patient records. Therefore it is vital for dental practices to invest in dentistry transcription services. With effective dentistry transcription, dental practices can stay organized and improve the quality of their services.