About 6 months to a year ago, a few transcription companies joined EMR and HIPAA as advertisers. Since that time I’ve had a chance to meet with these transcription companies and I must admit that the experience has been really quite intriguing.
So many people see the transcriptionists dieing out and being replaced by EMR and other related technology. Instead, I’ve seen a real strong set of transcription companies that are working to be a compliment to an EMR installation. That’s not to say that they’re not fighting for their lives. They are, but at least they’re not dead on the vine like many might have thought.
One example of this is in MxSecure’s offering an EMR for Medical Transcription companies.
We are really excited about this for other transcription companies. They are currently 2,000 small mom and pop transcription services across the country. They all are doing a great job documenting patient encounters for their customers. As technology is changing we want to help them add more value and keep their business. As compared to larger EMR companies that promote getting rid of your transcription we are the opposite. We are for whatever the physician thinks is most productive for them.
Add in a software like MModal to the dictated notes and I’m really interested to see how an EMR for medical transcription companies is going to work out.
Full Disclosure: As I stated above, MxSecure is an advertiser on my other EMR website, EMR and HIPAA. However, I was not paid or influenced to write this post. I just found it interesting and thought others would too.
It’s always better to adapt than go extinct: sounds like MxSecure learned a thing or to from the dinosaurs. I wonder, though, how that effects HITECH’s CPOE requirement; I remember there being a lot of discussion in the workgroup about CPOE having to be performed by a “licensed medical professional.” I’d be interested in hearing MxSecure or any other such products explain how transcription fit into the model the ONC envisions.
John – I started to write a response and then got distracted for a few minutes. When I came back my message was gone. Before I reconstruct it, thought I’d check to see if you got the first part of what I wrote, so I can just resume where I left off.
Looks to be the posts are going stright up, so let me start again…
The Medical Transcription (MT) industry actually has done a lot to advance itself amidst HIT, particularly EHR technologies, while supporting narrative dictation, which for many physicians is still the preferred method of information capture because it’s fast and easy (efficient) and it tends to more comprehensively captures the patient “story”. DRT, BESR and NLP are three examples of this. I’ll save the best for last.
1. Discrete Reportable Transcription (DRT) is the process of converting narrative dictation into text documents with discrete data elements than can be easily imported into the appropriate placeholders inside an EMR.
2. Backend Speech Recognition (BESR) has been in play for years which allows physicans to dictate without engaging the computer for realtime correction. The correction is instead done retrospectively by a medical transcriptionist. Some speech rec technologies (like M*Modal) support data structuring. The gap remains, however, in getting applications written that readily move that strucutred infomration into EHRs like DRT can.
3. Natural Language Processing (NLP) trumps both of these solutions because it takes a narrative report, regardless of how it was created, and codifies it (SNOMED) for a number of extraction, analytics and reporting applications: Patient Summary, DRT feed into an EMR, Core Measures and PQRI, coding automation, interoperability, and support for the majority of Meaningful Use requirements. Secondary use opens up to clinical trials and other applications as well.
Overall, if the transcription industry can market itself and get its messaging out through the right channels regaridng these innovations that augment transcription and keep physicians dictating, then transcription is a terrific EHR adoption facilitator, enables “practical use” along with Meaningful Use, and will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.
What a great phrase to sum up what so many critique in the MU requirements: “Practical Use!” Wish I’d coined that phrase.
[…] George’s description of the medical transcription technologies which I think people will find interesting: The Medical […]
Michelle,
It’s like a dance that’s done between the doctor and the transcriptionists. CPOE is possible alongside transcription though.
George,
Thanks for the comments. I appreciate the information. I also love the term “Practical Use” really interesting way to term it. I did a post about it on my other site. Although, I personally see MModal doing the NLP stuff as much as the BESR stuff.
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[…] really interesting transformations happening in the transcription industry (as I’ve written about before). One of those that I haven’t seen many people talking about is the transition of […]