In the current scenario healthcare facilities are faced with numerous challenges like increasing operational costs, declining reimbursements and patient bad debts. Healthcare facilities need to walk a thin line in order to keep providing quality healthcare services, coping with all the changes and challenges thrown at them and still maintaining a healthy bottom line

In a challenging scenario like this it is the need of the hour is for healthcare facilities to focus completely on their core business- that of providing quality healthcare and outsource all other activities. One such activity that can be outsourced is medical transcription, which plays a major role in the healthcare process but is not part of the core competence of the healthcare facility.

Outsourcing this process has a lot of advantages, one of the main being flexibility of choice. Healthcare facilities get to choose services that can be tailored to their specific needs making it cost effective and easy to use.

How does outsourcing provide flexibility of choice?

Outsourcing medical transcription essentially reduces the burden of the healthcare facilities towards anything connected with this process including the team, the equipment, the technology, infrastructure, process, responsibility of HIPAA/ HITECH during transcription, modes of document delivery, management and administration etc. By doing this outsourced service providers essentially provide flexibility of choice in the following:

Volume of transcription: Healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities have the flexibility of choice to avail accurate and timely services irrelevant of the volume of transcription. Availing services from an outside entity essentially ensures that the service provider has a qualified and trained team of transcriptionists to cope with the varying volume of report creation required.

Formats/ templates: It ensures that the reports required by doctors/ nurses are delivered to them in the format/ template even font specified by the healthcare professional.

Modes of dictation: It ensures that doctors/ other support staff the flexibility of choice of using flexible and familiar dictation modes. This further gives them the flexibility of using the time available to them optimally

Modes of document delivery: It ensures that the doctors/ nurses/ clinics/ hospitals have the choice of specifying the mode of document delivery required by them. Options like delivering transcripts to specific folders, delivering transcripts to multiple users, options for remote printing and faxing etc can be specified to the transcription vendor.

Turnaround time: This also avails the healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities the option to specify specific turnaround time depending on the urgency of the situation.

Editing and proof reading services for speech recognition: Some doctors/ nurses/ clinics/ hospitals may have invested in speech recognition software. However the accuracy of transcripts produced by this software may be below acceptable levels. Transcription vendors even offer the option of editing and proofreading services for such transcripts

Adopting EMR: Availing the services of a professional and technologically savvy vendor also offers healthcare professionals the option of retaining the traditional dictation- transcription method of capturing data while still offering option of integrating with EMR through HL7 interface.

Methods of billing: There are numerous options for billing methodology in medical transcription. Transcription vendors offer the healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals the choice of picking the billing methodology they are most comfortable with.

Converting fixed costs: One of the most significant benefit of outsourcing is that of choice of converting fixed costs incurred for medical transcription into variable costs. The expenses incurred are limited to the usage.

Outsourcing medical transcription provides healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals with the flexibility of choosing the parameters of these services as suited to their requirements.