Out-sourcing Of Medical Transcription – How It Works??

Many of the medical facilities outsource transcription for various reasons. For the convenience of the physicians and hospitals, we provide a wide variety of options to send us the dictations and to receive transcriptions:

-Toll free telephone lines
-Digital and cassette tape hand held recorders
-Dictation servers
-Transcriptions via secure e-mail, secure file transfer protocol or
website data bank
-Transcriptions via fax or remote internet printer

Dictation on toll free telephone lines:

This is a dedicated computerized system that allows the physicians to call in from any phone including cellular, and dictate. Once the toll free number is dialed voice prompts will guide through the process, which will enable the physicians to dictate. Each physician will be given a unique 4-digit id. Our dial-n-dictate program is very physician-friendly and prompts are given for each step. For the convenience of the physicians facilities like rewind, replay, save, abort, fast forward etc are also available. The chances of losing dictations are very remote eliminating the need for re-dictation.

Digital hand held recorders:

If the physician does not want to dial the numbers every time and do not want to be bound to a phone, digital hand held recorder is the best alternative.

A digital voice recorder is smaller or about the same size of an hand-held tape recorder and is operated like one.

Voice is recorded on internal / removable memory cards like those used in digital cameras. Each card can take up to 10 hours of dictation. It can be plugged into a computer interface and the voice can be sent to the transcription company via Internet. The voice can be saved into the computer or deleted so that the card can be reused. One can continue to record on another card if one is full. Hence waiting for the files to transfer if avoided. By keeping a few cards available, physician can record wherever and whenever required.

It is very easy and takes very little time to remove the card from the recorder, insert it into a computer interface and transfer the files via Internet.

Most important point to remember is, all the transfers should be secure and appropriate HIPAA compliant file transfer program has to be selected like secure ftp, secure email

Dictation servers

The transcription service provider can log into the hospital dictation server if the hospital is already having one.

Alternatively, inexpensive computer programs are available. Physician can directly dictate to the computer using a wireless or wired microphone. The transcription service provider can access these dictations.

Getting back the Transcriptions

Transcribed records can be received by one of the following options:

As an email attachment. However the email service should be secure and HIPAA compliant.

Transcriptions can be received via fax or remote internet printer by which docuemtns are directly printed by the transcription service provider at the physician’s end.

Transcriptions can be downloaded from the secure ftp site provided by the medical transcription service provider.

Some of the transcription service providers like Vision Infonet will have online data servers. Physicians can access these servers through a browser to:

-Search, view and secure download the transcriptions anytime
-Transcriptions can be edited and saved online.
-Respective voice file can be played while editing
-Electronic signature can be added.
-Automatic faxing the transcriptions can be done