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!
Showing posts with label Health Records. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health Records. Show all posts
Sheriff: It's highly unlikely thieves accessed personal information
July 2, 2008
KSL team coverage | ksl.com
A tip led authorities to stolen medical billing records and to the arrest of the men behind it. That's reassuring news for the million and a half patients affected by the theft, but is their personal information safe?
Authorities are confident the suspects did not access confidential information, even though they knew early on, from media coverage, what was in those stolen tapes. A $1,000 reward was just too much for one of their friends to keep quiet about it.
Sheriff Jim Winder said, "The criminal element in this case is a circle, and within that circle, fortunately, there was someone willing to contact us."
A phone call Monday night led authorities to the missing records and to the suspects. Sheriff's deputies arrested 37-year-old Shadd Hartman on one count of possession of stolen property and one count of unlawful possession of another's ID.
Fifty-two-year-old Thomas Howard Anderson was arrested on one count of theft by receiving and one count of identity fraud. A third suspect is in jail on unrelated charges.
"These were individuals with substantial criminal histories that found an opportunity and did take these tapes," Winder said.
Investigators say last month one of the suspects randomly broke into the SUV with the records inside. The vehicle belongs to a courier for an offsite storage company. That courier broke policy by taking the records to his Kearns home.
The records contained information for 1.5 million University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics patients, including Jenni Todd. She said, "I'm glad they found it. I'm glad that they found the records and arrested some people."
But Todd says, she's still a little concerned. "It almost scares me more because if there's a ring of people, maybe they were really trying to steal our identities," she said.
But authorities don't believe any patient information was compromised. They say the suspects didn't have the means or the knowledge to access them. "They definitely are not techies. There's no question about that. I don't know if they could find their rear ends with both hands," Winder said.
But the U isn't taking any chances. IT plans to work with the FBI to determine if any patients' records are at risk. The U is still offering free credit monitoring for a year.
Jenni Todd plans to take advantage of it. She said, "Just to make sure, and it's also just good to have credit monitoring anyway."
The U has spent $2 million to notify affected patients and offer services. University Health Care says until the FBI verifies through forensic testing that the personal information was not accessed, the hospital will keep current safety measures in place.
"We take our patient confidentiality information very seriously, and so that's currently in place. And we'll continue to work with law enforcement officials to determine whether there's any risk of that information having been accessed," said David Entwistle, CEO of University Hospitals and Clinics.
University Health Care has also released a statement on the recovery of the records. Two class-action lawsuits have been filed in this case.
The KSL Team:
KSL team coverage | ksl.com
A tip led authorities to stolen medical billing records and to the arrest of the men behind it. That's reassuring news for the million and a half patients affected by the theft, but is their personal information safe?
Authorities are confident the suspects did not access confidential information, even though they knew early on, from media coverage, what was in those stolen tapes. A $1,000 reward was just too much for one of their friends to keep quiet about it.
Sheriff Jim Winder said, "The criminal element in this case is a circle, and within that circle, fortunately, there was someone willing to contact us."
A phone call Monday night led authorities to the missing records and to the suspects. Sheriff's deputies arrested 37-year-old Shadd Hartman on one count of possession of stolen property and one count of unlawful possession of another's ID.
Fifty-two-year-old Thomas Howard Anderson was arrested on one count of theft by receiving and one count of identity fraud. A third suspect is in jail on unrelated charges."These were individuals with substantial criminal histories that found an opportunity and did take these tapes," Winder said.
Investigators say last month one of the suspects randomly broke into the SUV with the records inside. The vehicle belongs to a courier for an offsite storage company. That courier broke policy by taking the records to his Kearns home.
The records contained information for 1.5 million University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics patients, including Jenni Todd. She said, "I'm glad they found it. I'm glad that they found the records and arrested some people."
But Todd says, she's still a little concerned. "It almost scares me more because if there's a ring of people, maybe they were really trying to steal our identities," she said.
But authorities don't believe any patient information was compromised. They say the suspects didn't have the means or the knowledge to access them. "They definitely are not techies. There's no question about that. I don't know if they could find their rear ends with both hands," Winder said.
But the U isn't taking any chances. IT plans to work with the FBI to determine if any patients' records are at risk. The U is still offering free credit monitoring for a year.
Jenni Todd plans to take advantage of it. She said, "Just to make sure, and it's also just good to have credit monitoring anyway."
The U has spent $2 million to notify affected patients and offer services. University Health Care says until the FBI verifies through forensic testing that the personal information was not accessed, the hospital will keep current safety measures in place.
"We take our patient confidentiality information very seriously, and so that's currently in place. And we'll continue to work with law enforcement officials to determine whether there's any risk of that information having been accessed," said David Entwistle, CEO of University Hospitals and Clinics.
University Health Care has also released a statement on the recovery of the records. Two class-action lawsuits have been filed in this case.
The KSL Team:
E-mail: syi@ksl.com
E-mail: corton@ksl.com
E-mail: mgiauque@ksl.com
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