How is Medical Transcription Done?

By Raj | Jul 10, 2007

In the medical transcription workflow process, primarily, the doctors on their part dictate their messages into digital voice recorders, personal digital assistants (PDAs), tapes, Dictaphones etc., and transfer the recorded voice messages to a server to be accessed by the medical transcriptionist.

On the part of a medical transcriptionist, the medical transcription process involves retrieving those recorded messages, playing them on a voice player with foot pedal for start/stop control, listening the played files with headphone/earphone, typing the dictated messages on a word processor and returning the completed files back to the server or doctor or hospital as appropriate.

Dictionaries for language, medical terms and surgical terms; and reference material for drugs, laboratory values and abbreviations; and directories for locating hospitals, clinics, labs and doctors; and spell checkers for pointing out spelling mistakes are needed in this process to carve out a perfect report.

As the documents produced are healthcare related and the propensity for litigation is more, there is no room for error! The reports should be highly confidential and HIPAA compliant too. Let us discuss about HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) later.