What is Medical Transcription?

Medical Transcription is transformation of voice files into Medical records. They can either be hard or soft copies. Medical records are the essence of the RCM process.

Whenever a patient and doctor encounter takes place, a record needs to be generated and all information pertaining to that visit needs to be captured. The records may be office visits, hospital discharges, or even Emergency Room visits. All the specialties are covered. These records need to be maintained for Insurance purposes. The insurance or third party payors will release the payment for the doctor’s services once they receive these medical charts.

Normally, the doctor’s secretary used to do this job. Slowly over time, the doctors started using Dictaphones and the voice files or dictations were recorded and the secretaries can transcribe at any time. With the advent of Internet, this job started flowing out of hospitals and clinics into transcription services which were located outside the hospitals or clinics. Transcription jobs were slowly outsourced to other countries from USA. India was one such country because we had a huge population who were English literate and were fast learners. The time difference between the Americas and India also was beneficial. The doctors dictated during their days and during the nights, the files were sent over to India. As we were 12 hours ahead of USA, we could transcribe the files and send them back to the doctors the very next day morning.

The skill sets required for a medical transcriptionist is excellent English knowledge. Also very high typing speed is mandatory along with basic computer skills. The training course for medical transcription will be around 4-5 months during which the candidates will be acclimatized to American English language, Anatomy and Physiology course, and typing lessons will also be included. Transcriptionists will be exposed to American accent by listening to voice files via headphones. Slowly they will learn and gradually learn to transcribe the dictations at an amazing speed. Error free dictations will pass through levels of quality checks before finally landing on the doctor’s table.

During the period between 1999 – 2010, Medical transcription industry boomed. Gradually voice recognition software was introduced and these jobs were eroded and the speech recognition – SR engines have become quite good in handling doctors dictations and the output quality is quite high. Though human intervention is still needed to check the errors, proof read and quality control audits are maintained, SR has replaced many MTs. Bureau of Labor Statistics of USA has predicted a 3% decline in MT jobs in the future.

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