Medical Transcription in India: A challenging career option!

Upendra Singh | MyNews.in
1/7/2008, 7:04:10 PM(IST)

Medical Transcription is one of the fastest growing fields in health care business in Western countries, especially in the US where the entire healthcare industry is based on insurance, and detailed medical documents are needed for processing insurance claims. Therefore, the hospitals and doctors avail medical transcription services to cater with the demands of documental records, basically outsourcing the business. In the last few years, India has shown an unprecedented success in this field of medical transcription cashing in on the outsourced business from US and other western countries.

Medical Transcription provides an exciting and challenging job option with an ever expanding knowledge based career. It is the process whereby a medical transcriptionist has to accurately and swiftly transcribe medical records dictated by doctors and their associates comprising of history and physical reports, clinical notes, office visit notes, operative reports, consultation notes, discharge summaries, official letters, psychiatric evaluations, laboratory reports, x-ray and MRI reports and pathology reports. A medical transcriptionist is a person who carries out the process of converting the voice format of medical data into text data.

The data is received in the form of digital data files and voice data files and converted into text format in the process of transcription. There are certain prerequisites to convert those voice files into text documents which basically involve transcription and editing. To ensure maximum accuracy, the editing part of the transcribed files include quality checking, visual proofreading, spelling checks, grammatical corrections, rephrasing to streamline the context, and removal of inconsistencies and illogical content so that the desired accuracy of at least 98% is met before being uploaded back to the clients.

India provides an ideal locale for conducting medical transcription work with a large population of educated English speaking people, a large pool of IT professionals, the internet revolution, and the computer-savvy new generation aided by free market policy. Advancement in technology has tremendously metamorphosed the global economy and work place and the field of medical transcription has undergone tremendous progress because of constant advances in communication and Internet technology. Majority of the work is outsourced from US, but even British and Australian doctors are beginning to consider India as a possible source of getting this work done-quickly and efficiently.

Outsourcing of medical transcription work to India has the direct and immediate advantage of cost reduction, reliability in turnaround time, and total document security. The comparative low cost in India to those of US or other developed countries serves as an encouragement for companies abroad to outsource their work to the Indian Medical Transcription field thereby making India to be one of the top destinations of medical transcription industry. Turnaround time is critical in this industry, and India, because of its advantageous time zone in comparison to America and Europe, holds the advantage of delivering the work the very next working day for them.

India witnessed a boom in medical transcription field a few years back with a plethora of companies and training institutes mushrooming all over the place, but due to lack of training, experience and planning, most of them went into oblivion. Those who augured well with this new concept of business still persist and are providing job opportunities to thousands. The success of the surviving companies is a kind of indication that medical transcription, if handled appropriately, has the capability of creating opportunities and maneuvering the Indian job scenario to an extent.

Transcription services in India range from small, one-person home-based businesses to sophisticated, high-tech IT enabled corporations which employ transcriptionist on well paid pay rolls. In the metros and major cities, many big business names have ventured into this field and are flourishing and expanding day in and day out. Most of the bigger companies prefer to have in-house training programs so as to cater with the demand and curb down the effects of growing attrition rate. Some medical transcription firms even get their work done by employing on-site as well as home-based medical transcription basis.

It is not a cake walk for Indian companies in this field to compete with the medical transcription professionals of the western nations who seem to enjoy all the advantages of language and backdoor environment. Every now and then there is an anti outsourcing voice raised for the work outsourced to India and trying to bring out faults in the work done here. At the same time, Indian industry is pitted against some new developing destinations like China, Philippines, Sri Lanka and others who are eager to fight out with Indian dominance. But still India enjoys an upper hand with its efficient work force and competency which augurs well with the high demanding western world. Ultimately, what matters most is the honest work, truthfulness, and diligence which would win against all odds!

Private Equity Investors Favor India Over China

Economic Times of India May 27, 2008, 9:12AM EST

A report by Four-S Services shows India receiving about $19.5 billion worth of private equity investment in 2007, vs. $12.8 billion for China—a flip-flop from 2006

More PE funds flocked to India compared to China in 2007. For the first time, China PE investments were in the range of $12.8bn; nearly 34% less than the investments in India at $19.5bn. This was a huge change from 2006, when China received $12.9bn worth of PE investments, nearly 70% more than the $7.6bn received by India.

However, there was a qualitative difference in the way funds were deployed in China compared to India. China's traditional Manufacturing & Infrastructure sectors attracted $8.3bn, constituting 65% of total funds invested; compared to $6.2bn constituting 32% of the total for India in 2007, according to a Four-S Services report .

Interestingly, the core sectors were the main areas of PE interest. Infrastructure (Engineering & Construction) sector accounted for a lion's share of the deals in 2007 with nearly $4.0bn worth of investments (20.5% of total PE/VC investments announced during the Year).

As core development continues to be a high priority, Infrastructure is expected to be one of the fastest growing sectors in India, requiring huge investments worth $492bn over the next 5 years. The major growth driver within the Infrastructure sector was the Construction industry, accounting for 60.3% of the investments.

The top four sectors of Infrastructure, Telecom, BFSI and Real Estate (in that order) received nearly 72.3% of all PE investments during 2007.

Indian PE performance rocked last year mainly due to the fact that there are more private enterprises in India than in China that are attractive to PEs. Though India has always had a higher percentage of private sector companies compared to China, it is only in recent years that there has been a spreading of awareness among the investing community of the strong education system, English language proficiency, legal & financial structures and democratic governance in the country, says the report titled Indian Private Equity Report 2007.

This awareness, combined with sustained growth, has led to increasing investments in India. Also, the year saw some mega IPOs in China, drawing large investments from FIIs & PEs, leading them to limit their private deals and thus maintain their China exposure at certain levels.

Year 2007 saw Private Equity (PE) and Venture Capital (VC) investments 'Riding a Wave of Euphoria' in India. If 2006 was about PE/VC activity 'Bursting into Bloom', by 2007, the sentiment had risen to ecstatic levels as can be witnessed in the phenomenal growth of PE/VC investments in India, which hit an unprecedented $19.5bn in 2007, 2.5 times the $7.6bn figure of 2006, the report adds.

Total PE/VC investments announced in Indian companies was $19.5bn across 394 deals in 2007, compared to $7.6bn across 298 deals in 2006. The average deal size nearly doubled compared to 2006 ($41.7mn v/s $21.7mn), as even smaller investors that earlier used to look for $5-10mn deals began looking for $20-25mn deals. Also, there was a sectoral shift towards Infrastructure, Telecom & Real Estate,which witnessed the major big ticket deals of the year.

IT/ITES sector was the biggest loser, with investments dropping by 37.5% on YoY basis due to the slower profitability growth forecast. The slowdown in the sector was based on the adverse impact of the over 10% appreciation in the rupee and the depressed conditions in the US economy, which is a major source of revenue for Indian IT companies. Also, most of the big IT firms were not looking to raise funds. However, the sector still managed a record 84 small size deals, mainly in the web-based Information Services Industry and in the BPO/KPO Industry.

Traditional favourites like IT/ITES, Manufacturing and Healthcare together comprised only 18.5% of all investments by value in 2007, compared to 40.6% in 2006, mainly due to better and bigger opportunities in other areas of the economy and comparatively slower growth rates in these 3 sectors.