Celebrate National Medical Transcriptionist Week May 18-24, 2009

AHDI,  (The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity, formerly known as AAMT,  The American Association for Medical Transcription) celebrates ‘National Medical Transcriptionist Week’ every year in May for the critical role that we, medical transcriptionists, (healthcare documentation specialists) play in the accurate capture and documentation of patient encounter information. This year in light of the shifting economy, the evolution of enabling technologies like the electronic health record (EHR) and speech recognition technology (SRT), and the workforce challenges that medical transcription industry is facing, AHDI is urging all the stakeholders in the industry to acknowledge the critical role that an interpretive, skilled knowledge worker will continue to play in the electronic future of healthcare delivery.

We discussed in the previous post on how EHR is going to be a threat to medical transcriptionists.  Veterans, experts and stalwarts of this industry agree that in the technology-driven documentation future, traditional transcription ought to give way to a hybrid role of narrative transcription, template and SRT draft editing, accuracy analysis, and data abstracting, with the long-term goal of creating cost-saving efficiency in healthcare delivery. This means the industry will demand fewer documentation professionals to manage the same workload, and that only the most skilled, interpretive, credentialed documentation professionals will be selected for those roles.

Hence as a part of the MT Week celebrations this year during the week May 18-24, 2009, AHDI is calling all healthcare documentation workers to prepare for the future of the medical transcription industry – to be ready to step in to the new roles that will emerge in the era of EHR.  It is the interpretive clinical knowledge of this skilled worker that will continue to make the difference between risk and quality in healthcare documentation.

To that end, AHDI is calling for action from all students, postgraduates, and working MTs in the industry while promoting MT Week theme, ‘Knowledge is Everything’ to embrace the path of greatest potential relevance in the future.

See further details on what you have to do yourself to face the emerging challenges, how you can promote this campaign, and how you can be a part of this year’s MT Week at AHDI’s National Medical Transcriptionist Week Program.

Happy Medical Transcriptionist Week to all the readers of MT Herald.

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• I am Interviewed At Medical Transcriptionist Dot Org