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.

Anyone that works in Healthcare IT knows who John Halamka is and so of course I was interested in his post of his top 10 impressions after HIMSS. It’s an interesting list and I think he does a pretty good job of looking at things from a very high level. Here they are as posted on his blog:

1. Meaningful Use is everywhere. Vendors are promising EHRs, modules, appliances, and services to help clinicians achieve it. I had dinner on Monday night in a small Indian vegetarian restaurant. Sitting next to me were 3 engineers from Bangalore who were arguing about the details of Meaningful Use in between bites of vegetable curry. I could not escape Meaningful Use anywhere!

2. Certification is everywhere. It’s particularly ironic that many vendors claimed their systems were certified, even though the certification NPRM was just released today, making compliance with the new certification process in time for HIMSS impossible.

3. Cloud computing, Software as a Service and ASP models are popular tactics to accelerate EHR rollouts. There are still lingering concerns about how to ensure privacy in a cloud environment.

4. Several firms such as Intersystems, Axolotol, and Medicity are offering HIE platforms that include many of the standards noted in the IFR. The marketplace for HIE products is just emerging and it’s hard to predict who will become the market leader.

5. The Continuity of Care Document is gaining traction. I found many vendors supporting CCD exports from their EHRs. A company called M*Modal , has developed natural language processing technology that captures dictated content in its original context (ontology-driven
rules) as a CDA document.

6. Consultants abound. It’s clear that Regional Extension Centers and Health Information Exchanges will require expertise and staffing from professional firms. They all had large booths at HIMSS.

7. 30,000 people attended, including 10,000 I did not recognize (just kidding). It’s clear to me that many IT professionals, even those with limited healthcare domain expertise, attended HIMSS to better understand how they could participate in the euphoria of HITECH stimulus dollars.

8. Self service kiosks for patient identification and self-registration are now mainstream. Just as we print our airline boarding passes, we can now use credit cards or biometrics to check into ambulatory care appointments and automatically settle all co-pay balances.

9. Image exchange in the cloud is being offered by several vendors. As I mentioned in Monday’s blog, Symantec announced an appliance for small clinician offices that cloud enables all imaging modalities using a facebook-like social networking invitation to share/view images.

10. PHRs and patient engagement are becoming more mainstream. Google and Microsoft continue to innovate in the non-tethered PHR marketplace.