Outsourcing medical transcription has been the traditional way in which physicians ensured accurate and timely documentation as well as more time to spend with their patients. A common complaint of patients now is that they are not able to communicate with their physicians comfortably, and with the advent of the electronic health record system, physicians are forced to spend hours and hours in front of their computers for medical data entry. This affects the performance of the physicians as they are not able to spend quality time with or focus exclusively on their patients. However, medical transcription companies can still be of support providing effective EHR integrated medical transcription that helps physicians to focus more on their patients.
Placing documentation responsibilities on physicians not only affects their performance but also the quality of patient care provided. Physicians play a crucial role in the healthcare industry and their duty is to provide quality care to patient and not spend valuable time on documentation.
What Patients Face
Doctor visits are often hurried and patients hardly get 15 minutes with the physician, which means that each and every second counts and the patients must use them wisely. According to a study by the University of South Carolina, which casts a gloomy picture of doctor-patient communication, upon entering the examination room, doctors interrupted their patients on an average after 23 seconds and after that the interruptions continued as many as a dozen times more till the visit ended. This leads to patient dissatisfaction and even poor documentation when the patients don’t communicate or are not allowed to communicate well. If the doctor is engaged in some other task like reading a chart or spending time on the computer documenting patient data he/she may fail to hear what the patient is saying. Since the patients have very less time with the doctor, every second should be spent wisely. There should be a normal and natural interaction between the patient and the physician.
Effective doctor-patient communication is a central clinical function for delivering high quality healthcare. It is important to establish good communication between the doctor and the patient. Good communication with the patients is therapeutic and the patient’s perception of the quality of healthcare depends on his/her interactions with the physician. With effective communication patients can ultimately improve their health by participating in their care and via adherence to treatment.
A good transcription service helps to reduce the documentation task of physicians and this enables physicians to focus more on the patient.
Accurate Medical Documentation with Medical Transcription Services
Error-free, high quality and accurate patient data is necessary for any healthcare unit. A minor error in the billing records can result in delayed or denied reimbursement and increased scrutiny on hospitals, physicians and other healthcare organizations. The EHR system undoubtedly has many benefits. Doctors can still leverage those benefits while also staying free from the data entry tasks with outsourced medical transcription solutions. The physician’s role in documentation should be focused on dictation rather than manual data entry into the EHR. EHR voice recognition software is another option that enables doctors to narrate directly into the system and later review the dictation to ensure accuracy. However, speech recognition software is only evolving and it may take some time before we can have a flawless and efficient system that can understand accents and distinguish between similar sounding words, be able to handle multiple speakers, and address other challenges such as background noise and other disturbances.
