What Is The Importance Of Medical Transcription?
A doctor's job description :
Focusing on patient care.
Spending 4 hours of a 10-hour workday behind exhaustive paperwork that sees no light of the day.
Healthcare providers are beacons of medical expertise in our eyes, focusing on treating people's lives and keeping their Hippocratic Oath.
Or at least, that's how it used to be.
Yet, today's reality dictates a doctor's life with documentation and charts, hogging an entire one-third of their daily schedule. The haunting consequences in physicians’ routines lead to rushed appointments, a burnt-out mindset, and, at worst, an urge to give up.
To give back to doctors their rightfully deserved time, the 20th century came up with the idea of medical stenographers transcribing charted notes for doctors, easing their workload and providing new jobs to competent pursuers.
Just then, the enormous technological boom in the 2000s transformed the arena of medical transcription forever.
Renowned outsourcing companies, services, and software integration disrupted the lane of exhausting documentation for doctors, enhancing healthcare with medical transcription services.
What IS Medical Transcription?
The role of accurate medical transcription is more than putting words to paper.
It is an exercise of translation, where the language of medicine and diagnosis is converted into comprehensible precise notes, including simplifying medical jargon, abbreviations and scribbled notes of any physician.
Language of medicine comes in many structures to a medical transcriptionist, be it voice notes, audio files, or live dictations from physicians.
What do they contain?
The Medical Transcription Job Market
Today providers have found high financial value and ROI while exploring the significance of medical transcription. Hence, most Healthcare BPOs have plunged into outsourcing transcription talent. This niche and significant service has resulted in medical transcription being one of the leading jobs in today’s healthcare business.nbsp;
To put it statistically, Fact.MR has reported that the market for medical transcription employment was worth US$ 49.0 billion in 2022 and is predicted to grow to US$ 52.0 billion in 2023.
Demand for the market would surpass US$ 95.0 billion between 2023 and 2033, signalling substantial growth and openings for medical transcription jobs and opportunities.
Unveiling Medical Transcriptions Vital Rolenbsp;
These striking numbers might make you wonder; Why IS the demand so billion-dollar high?
Understanding medical transcription benefits can only come from understanding the core pain points that doctors face on a daily basis.
What do thousands of physicians suffer from when 4 hours of their work schedule get exhausted into documentation?
Even physicians themselves may not be aware of it, but WHO remarks that the most common documentation pain points are worth the cost of a patient’s life. Solving them is therefore indispensable.
4 Documentation Pain Points For Providersnbsp;
Patient adherence, that is, the strong commitment of patients to following their doctor's prescribed medications and recommendations, remains an instrumental part of every patient-physician relationship.
Unfortunately, this is not so common knowledge to physicians, whose lack of awareness has caused approximately 50% of patients to not take their medications as prescribed, study reveals. This is known as medical NON-adherence.
The most common cause behind patients failing to comply with doctors' instructions is inadequate/ lack of communication between patients and physicians. Moreover, physicians get so busy documenting their patient records during an appointment, that they fail to do the most crucial aspects of actually interacting with the patient, including:-
This further leads to patient dissatisfaction from misunderstanding vital information. Studies report that over 60% of patients, interviewed immediately after visiting their doctors, misunderstood the directions regarding prescribed medications.
Studies have reported that over 60% of patients, interviewed immediately after visiting their doctors, misunderstood the instructions for their prescribed medications.
The decreased therapeutic outcome may cause more severe consequences, with missed doses and omission of regimen costing patient health.
Instructing patients on their medications and listening to patient feedback is as much a nurse’s responsibility as a physician’s. Additionally, nurses must adhere to strict administrative guidelines that encompass patient safety and care. Hence, documenting patient treatments and diagnoses becomes part of their routine.
However, while studying the administration adherence of nurses, PubMed found three alarming results:-
All of this goes unheard due to nurses focusing too much on the documentation of patient records and writing prescriptions.
Due to excessive documentation burden and lost patient interaction, nurses are as prone to incorrect patient treatment as physicians are.
As a result, the study revealed a 48% rise in nurse non-adherence to medication administration guidelines. This is considered an abnormally high prevalence and serves as a potential risk to patient’s safety and needs prompt intervention.
As we have discussed, physician/ nurse burnout is alarming in the healthcare workplace.
However, prolonged unchecked burnout in the administration staff is worse.
From handling appointments to billing claims to managing patient medical records, the administration gets 2 times more burdened when they are instructed to transcribe complex prescriptions and physician charts for patients.
Although delivering clear directions on variable medications must be the top priority for providers, the massive administrative burden has negatively impacted the quality of these transcribed directions received by patients.
More than one-third of 1.5 million reportable adverse drug events are caused by wrong prescription label omissions and medication errors by pharmacies and admin staff.
It is true that pharmacies take on medical transcription in order to alleviate the rising physician burnout. However, deciphering complex notes all the while handling day-day critical administration tasks results in an unhealthy setting, both for providers and patients.
Every physician is liable to follow strict medical records guidelines, telling them how to structure their notes, adhere to syntax and technicalities, and comply with the patient readership.
Doctors are already bound by the rugged terrain of clinical work. Hence, adherence to non-clinical instructions like visit dates and summaries becomes time-consuming and wastes hours of the physician's daily routine.
Medical Transcriptions Pivotal Role Explainednbsp;
Every pain point stated above has ONE solution of change; exploring the significance of medical transcription; A medical scribe for every department in the healthcare service may join the providers and simply transcribe every interaction, discussion on patient medical records, voice notes and audio files of crucial information into structured precise documentation, according to client’s respective needs.
How exactly medical transcription transforms the exhausted workplace can be categorized into 3 branches:-
Firstly, physicians reclaim 6 hours of their daily schedule, which were previously spent on exhausting documentation. They gain back this valuable time streamlining medical records through medical transcription automation or service. This bolsters patient-physician relationships, elevating the patient experience during appointments by 70%. Why?
The findings of a meta-analysis by Birkhäuer et al. highlight an obvious fact that improved patient communication contributes to a quicker response to therapy and an acceleration of the healing process for patients. Meanwhile, they feel emotionally healthier and have more confidence in their healthcare provider.
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The role of accurate medical transcription services allows Physicians to instil the practice of warm communication with their patients while transcribing their conversation with ease and accuracy.
Physicians can enhance their patient-provider rapport brilliantly through different communication points:
At the end of the day, every provider can check the following boxes comfortably;-
Similarly, nurses are more likely to listen to feedback from patients, hear their complaints and provide instructions with mindless documentation out of their way.
The most considerable relief that specialized medical transcription services can provide to healthcare administration is; saving valuable time and costs.
The inevitable capacity of AI-powered medical transcription becomes evident in numerous studies, showing us that by automating just 36% of document processes, healthcare organizations can save up to hours of work time and $11 billion in claims.
Burnout becomes a forgotten nightmare through enhancing healthcare administration with transcription. As and when medical transcription services take over transcribing heavy medical records, the medical staff gets more leeway to focus on more critical aspects of their job schedules. Moreover, the quality of documentation won't be at the behest of exhaustion, as medical scribes use expertise to adopt errorless technical guidelines and implement them in their transcription/ documentation process.
The converted files turn out accurate and formatted according to the client’s requirements consistently.
As healthcare organizations adopt electronic medical records (EMRs), administration, including providers, face a huge hassle in updating their way of documentation. This results in an increased workload and contributes to burnout. With automated medical transcription, that problem gets solved, as one digitally centralized platform integrates every use case in healthcare, relieving providers and the staff from managing too many systems.
3. Financial ROI
WHO reports that globally, medical coding and documentation errors cost $42 billion USD yearly. Furthermore, according to WHO, the most frequent causes of errors are weak medication systems and/or human factors like exhaustion, and staff shortages, which have an impact on practices for prescribing, transcribing, dispensing, administering, and monitoring.
The horror of human lives and the financial loss in healthcare facilities are saved by the integration of one life-saving service, which is medical transcription.
Recordings can be beneficial in demonstrating all of the things a doctor did correctly. Recording and transcribing the patient encounter brings things out into the open proving effective services that the provider has served to the patient, maximizing chances for their fair reimbursement.
The underlying significance of accurate documentation is maintaining a healthy RCM. Accuracy, comprehension and precision in SOAP notes are prerequisites for accurate medical coding and billing.
As medical transcription services finish and submit their accurate documentation to the EHR, the medical coder appropriately assigns alphanumeric codes based on that documentation. Following this, a claim is made by the medical biller, before finally sending it to the insurance payer company. As clear as it gets, the major departments of RCM; medical coding and medical billing departments, both are blindly dependent on accurate documentation. Instead of relaying it into the hands of already exhausted hospital administration staff, it is definitively wiser to leave this task in the hands of medical transcription experts.
BONUS TIP TO PROVIDERS:
Today’s technology has made it easier for providers to avail of any of the three benefits. Yet, we all understand that grasping the benefit of all three kinds of ROI of medical transcription may be too good to be true.
This is why, RevMaxx thought of a solution;
An All-in-one Medical Scribe and Medial Coding App made exclusively for providers, RevMaxx harnesses the power of machine learning, deep learning and cutting-edge natural language processing to build an AI-powered medical assistant, that takes the best of every medical transcription tool in the market and builds a hybrid all-in-one model right in the pocket of providers.
How does it work?
RevMaxx goes beyond targeting the pain points of doctors, it enhances the healthcare workplace by its hybrid machine-learning model.
Automated Medical Transcription: The New Pioneer of 2023?
The talk of the future of medical transcription has been a daunting topic of discussion in 2023. This is because, most services feel automation might override medical transcription jobs, even when data clearly shows that the global market is rising at an all-time billion-dollar high.
However, automation has proven to be a cost-effective alternative, because of the soaring salary costs of outsourced services. A human scribe is 2x more expensive as a digital dictation app.
Because development in AI transcription breaks a new path of innovation every day, the future of medical transcription will eventually take shape in this perpetual, exponential advancement of AI transcription technology. Owing to the persistent need for thorough and accurate medical reporting and speed in administration, technology has made it possible for providers in healthcare to streamline their workflow, all the while fighting for patient care.
Due to the growing demand for accurate and swift medical care brought on by the ageing of our population, the need for medical transcription experts is rising alongside the healthcare industry.
Why do some people defend manual transcription over automation?
There is still a bias hanging over us: human expertise. Something about the authenticity of complex human knowledge makes the choice between manual and automatic medical transcription even harder. That “something” is showcased in a survey conducted by Statistica, where 73% of the survey respondents had raised “accuracy” as the fundamental obstruction to considering full automation.
It is true that automated transcription like RevMaxx has proven to be 97% accurate in its highly trained AI-powered voice recognition and medical coding. However, to combat that 3% error, RevMaxx still believes that collaboration with human expertise is necessary when the stakes of life-saving medical information and patient records are on the line - leading to risks in patient diagnosis and other severe denominations.
Hence, a hybrid environment, that breeds a collaboration between AI and human knowledge, has proven to work better than simple manual transcription.
Here are 4 reasons why RevMaxx invests in a HYBRID environment :
The word error rate is a metric that measures how many mistakes AI produces per unit of words. It's one of the most significant requirements for evaluating AI technology.
Because AI is still developing, ASR accuracy for transcription of human-to-human talks is also expanding. Because manual transcribing has a greater probability of accuracy than automatic transcription does, most healthcare providers choose it over the latter.
According to recent research, the word error rate (WER) for ASR used to record business phone calls still ranged between 13-23%, aggravating the common opinion.
Each medical specialization has a unique vocabulary. Hence, physicians who practice in particular fields will need a human eye to supervise the AI transcription to review physician jargon, abbreviations and complex wordings.
Globally, there are more than 6500 languages spoken across regions. Dialects and accents span out even more, beyond any statistical record. Naturally, no AI software can emulate so many languages into their training model. Surveys have suggested that 66% of the respondents had a clear objection to the failure of AI in recognising the right dialect or cultural variables in accent, which they consider “problematic” for voice recognition.
This remains one of the significant hurdles that AI is working to overcome in medical transcription. RevMaxx understands the complexities of social determinants of health (SDH) that may affect medical coding and billing. Hence, it promotes awareness among providers to consider before opting for AI.
Many background noises in a hospital workplace interrupt the speech-to-text procedure in emerging AI software. Even though RevMaxx has been trained to deliver accuracy with its tried and tested supervised learning in deep learning software, providers are still fearful of AI medical transcription in general, owing to the 3% chance of potential error.
That being said, many AI transcription tools have updated their noise reduction techniques to filter out background noise and improve the accuracy of transcriptions. These techniques include spectral subtraction, Wiener filtering, and adaptive filtering, integrating highly trained procedures to achieve human-level accuracy.
The Final Verdict
There is no doubt that medical transcription will continue to soar higher in the job market with the rising demand in healthcare facilities. Our article provides the urgent need for more medical transcription services at the behest of providers, administration and patient safety. The healthcare industry is grateful for the services that medical transcription provides. However, there is still room for ample deliberation, discussion and evaluation on the pathway that medical transcription will head to. Are we going to build a hybrid platform, have automation rule the stage, or stick to manual transcription?
RevMaxx always believes in the collaboration between technology and human knowledge. It is imperative for providers to choose a path that leads them to the same.