Medical Transcription service providers are adopting many new technologies to work with providers to enhance their EMR experience. Most EMRs give the freedom to the physician to decide whether to use Point and Click, Voice Recognition or Medical Transcription to document their patient visit. Many healthcare providers are finding that medical transcription can complement EMRs and improve their usability along with providing additional benefits as listed below.
- More eye contact with the patient: Documenting the patient visit in the EMR may require physicians to work on a computer during the patient visit. This decreases the physician’s ability to provide focused care to the patient while increasing the mundane clerical, data-entry tasks. For non tech-savvy doctors the process of capturing the complete patient encounter on a computer in front of a patient can be tedious and difficult.
- Create more complete and meaningful notes: Dictating a note can provide a more descriptive narrative of the patient’s condition. Output from point and click templates can be too canned and lose individuality for each patient.
- Integrate seamlessly with EMRs: With the new technologies that are evolving and readily available, medical transcription can be used to automatically populate the transcribed notes into the appropriate fields of the EMR. This provides the best of both worlds giving the physician more meaningful time with the patient.
- Ease of use due to familiarity: Dictation is the most intuitive and least time-consuming means of documenting a patient encounter. Many physicians are familiar with it and it does not require them to make a drastic change in their workflow. They can dictate anytime, anywhere at their convenience using their cell phone, Dictaphone or telephone.
- Saves time by reducing time consuming data entry/editing: The major issue with front-end speech recognition technologies is the time it takes the physician to work with voice recognition to create and edit a lengthy documentation note. Transcription provides for more efficient use of the clinician’s time since a trained transcriptionist can create extremely accurate, high quality documentation and also identify possible errors in
the dictation. When clinicians use point and click and EMR note entry to enter data directly into the EMR, it takes them significantly longer to document the patient encounter. Often customization of EMR templates can be inflexible and costly. Using a transcriptionist to type the notes or directly enter the data into the EMR from the physician dictation decreases the time a physician spends on clerical and data-entry tasks. - Maintains revenue and the number of patients seen: When EMRs are implemented and the point and click templates are used by physicians to document the patient encounter, it takes the physician significantly more time and concentration to create the progress notes. This results in a reduction in the number of patients seen and therefore reduced revenues. Using medical transcription to document the notes can free up the
physician’s time to see an increased number of patients.
With all the new technologies available medical transcription can be used seamlessly along with EMRs to increase the efficiency and accuracy of clinical documentation and provide physicians the flexibility of spending more time with their patients while maintaining revenues.