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!

Medical Transcription: Automation is Driving Growth in Speech Recognition

Friday, 27 June 2008, 06:02 CDT | redOrbit News

Healthcare automation is driving growth in speech technology, with the leading vendors providing specialized solutions, according to a new report by Datamonitor. Although use of PC-based speech recognition is not widespread, the technology has found its niche in the healthcare market, where automation and cost savings are key drivers.

Tight budgets and the need for accurate patient records are forcing healthcare providers to automate processes with speech recognition. In order to reduce the error rate in diagnosis and ensure that information is recorded efficiently, healthcare providers are adopting electronic health records (EHRs).

By dictating notes directly into EHRs, using speech recognition with digital dictation systems, doctors can update information faster and with lower error rates. Patient information is gradually becoming digitized in order to deliver test results and records more quickly. By reducing the number of illegible handwritten documents and simplifying processes, providers can eradicate errors in diagnosis.

Speech recognition is also being used for medical transcription, easing pressure on transcriptionists and allowing healthcare providers to save on staffing costs. Medical transcription is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar market and speech recognition vendors are taking advantage of this.

Healthcare currently represents 85% of the PC- and server-based speech recognition market. Datamonitor estimates that the market for speech recognition in healthcare globally is worth an estimated $170m in 2008. Between 2008 and 2013 the market will more than double in size.

Imaging is one area in which speech recognition has seen a significant uptake, as an increasing number of radiologists use the technology to dictate reports. Radiologists work in controlled environments using specialized vocabularies to dictate reports that, as they often use repeated language, are an ideal target for speech recognition vendors.

Healthcare is not the only industry where speech recognition is thriving. Investments in speech technology are expected to grow in the professional services, where it can help with legal transcription. The technology is also likely to be increasingly used to assist with language learning in education. However, healthcare will remain the largest market for speech recognition through 2013.

The introduction of digital dictation and EHRs has given speech recognition new channels to market. Speech technology adoption will increase as it becomes more tightly integrated with these solutions to provide a seamless document production process.

Source: Datamonitor