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Wednesday 31 July 2013

Professional Transcription Services And Solutions

By Maryanne Goff


Professional transcription services come at a premium since it is hard to automate, and cannot be handled by an unskilled transcriptionist without the requisite training, experience and tools. It's the details that count, because a lot of the work calls for a high degree of accuracy. One mistake can prove catastrophic for a whole lot of people.

Maybe it would be better to start from the concept and work upwards towards today's real-world needs and implementation solutions. As per definition, the business of transcription involves taking speech in some form (live or recorded audio/video) and converting it into text that can be stored as digital data. This is done by a transcriptionist who listens to the audio and types it as text.

No doubt the first thought that comes to mind is that anybody could do this. True, but that doesn't guarantee accuracy and speed. This is where the professional part comes into the picture. There are hardware and software tools that can be used to improve on the quality and volume of the work done. The industry standard is that 15 minutes of audio should be transcribed in an hour.

Tools aside, the job calls for intensive training and has a fairly high learning curve. Medical transcription providers require their staff to be well-versed in the field of medicine and aware of all the terminology that physicians use. Many will hire pharmacy and nursing assistants and train them to be transcriptionists.

Doctors record their diagnosis and everything they want included in a case file, and this audio then has to be transcribed perfectly. A single mistake can prove fatal to the patient, and would lead to a medical malpractice lawsuit. It could easily end the careers of the involved physicians and hospital or clinic administrators.

Another critical aspect involves the security of the data as it goes back and forth between the client and transcription company. Health care records must be HIPAA compliant in the U. S. In order to protect the privacy and security of a patient's information, and this applies to third-party providers too. Compatibility is another concern, because the EMR/HER (electronic medical record) system used requires input data that is standardized in terms of nomenclature and other protocols.

A law firm will likewise need 100 percent accuracy in its transcriptions. Lawyers take depositions and have hours of recordings that must be transcribed word for word. Again, one mistake could result in a client losing the case in court, and this clerical error on the lawyer's part would be grounds enough for a malpractice claim.

Recorded speech transcriptions aside, there are many value-added professional transcription services that are in heavy demand. For instance, audio may be transcribed into text in several languages. Live video streams need closed captioning, and this is yet another area where no error will be tolerated since there is no verification process and it cannot be corrected. The bottom line here is that trying to get transcriptions done on the cheap often leads to be very expensive.




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