As everyone knows, medical transcription is one of the fastest growing fields in the healthcare industry. Medical transcriptionists are in high demand in the industry today. In general, their job is to listen to the dictated recordings made by the physicians and transcribe them accurately. The importance of a good medical scribe becomes more apparent with an increasing need for accurate medical documentation. Hospitals and other healthcare providers are now increasingly resorting to outsourcing their medical transcription jobs to reliable providers as quality in transcription is important along with speed, cost, and turnaround times.
The medical transcription industry is certainly not unfamiliar with changes. The latest trends that impact the medical transcription industry include:
- Advancements in speech recognition software
- The new guidelines on electronic health records (EHR) by the US Health and Human Services (HHS) department.
The advancement in speech recognition technology enables physicians to create an electronic document easily by dictating the medical reports to a computer. But, to clean up possible errors in the software generated document and to create an accurate document you will need the service of a skilled medical transcriptionist. So, it is sure that their demand will remain high.
With the national initiative to encourage physicians to implement EHR in their practices, the traditional way of transcribing and creating a word-processed document is going to change. Transcriptionists need to improve their skill-sets with the knowledge of the particulars of the latest EHR structure. Data such as allergies, smoking status and medications will have to be separated and entered into separate fields in a standardized format. In the process of creating a structured electronic health record, the medical transcriptionist will have to deal with structured templates, point-and-click fields, and pull-down menus.
