What makes a good medical transcription vendor?

What is medical transcription?
The process of conversion of a dictated medical report into soft copy format by entering the dictated data into a computer using any word processing program is known as medical transcription.

Why do you need one?
The entire healthcare industry today is based on insurance and detailed medical records form the basis for processing insurance claims. Medical practice too is bound by a very strict code of ethics and statutes. These statutes have to be adhered to very strictly since mistakes can lead to multi million dollar lawsuits.

Therefore detailed & extensive documentation is carried out at every stage of medical examination and tests. These documentation can consume up to 40-50% of the doctor’s time. Since Doctors are very highly paid and busy professionals with very little time to spare, they usually dictate their medically oriented reports into computers or other voice-recording device. These dictated reports are heard and converted into soft copy format by entering them on computer.

What is a medical transcriptionist?

A Medical Transcriptionist, or "MT" is a person who assists physicians and specialty surgeons usually by transcribing, formatting, and proofreading their dictated medically-oriented reports. Most commonly, MTs transcribe physicians' dictation that outlines a patient's health. Normally medical transcription services are provided by transcription vendors.
Therefore you need to check on your transcription vendor and the staff they have.

What are the attributes of a good medical transcription vendor? You should check if the staff of your transcription vendor have the following :

• A good knowledge of medical terms used
• An ability to understand foreign accents
• Good data entry skills
• Know basic medical anatomy, in order to be able to follow what is being dictated.
• Know or learn Latin and Greek verbs and adjectives used in medicine,
• Know how to combine forms, suffixes and prefixes
• Have fluency in English & can fix poor grammar and syntax "on the fly"

Other Suggestions

Ask for your transciption to be done by an experienced transcriber.

Also, check if your transciption vendor subscribes to medical magazines so that their staff is always up to date on latest medical terminology.

Casually ask your vendor what renuemeration the staff get. If they are getting about $200/month your are making a bad bargain, because they will allot a novice to you. Good and experienced medical transciptionist earn around $300 to $400 per month.

Where to find a good & affordable medical transcription vendor? Medical Transciption is very expensive in the US. An alternative solution is to outsource it to companies in India or south east Asia. Here english language is widely spoken, plus they have the advantage of cheap skilled labor.

Alternatively, you can contact us at http://www.gmrtranscription.com We get our transciption done in India so we are affordable.

GMR TRANSCRIPTION STYLE GUIDE

Introduction:

Please consider the four links below as a “must read.” These will help you better understand the basics of each topic, which is necessary in our work in order to provide the best documents possible to our clients. Please read and review ALL of these tutorials online, and it may be quite useful to print out each topic and place it in a binder for future reference.

GRAMMAR:

http://www.ccbc.cc.pa.us/lc/OWL/tutor.html

PUNCTUATION:

http://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/

SPELLING:

http://www.m-w.com/

COMMON ENGLISH ERRORS:

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors

ZIP CODE FOR U.S. CITY SPELLINGS:

http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/citytown.jsp

U.S. CITIES AND TOWNS SPELLINGS:

http://www.city-data.com/

Wikipedia is an excellent source for locating the spelling for ANY country and its cities, towns, districts, provinces, etc. Simply type the country name in the search engine, followed by “Wikipedia,” and there should be a Wikipedia site for that country, where all cities, towns, districts, provinces, etc. will be listed.

Some other areas of concern are listed below:

1. Initially, when you contracted with us, we supplied you with a sample of what a document should look like. Please follow that format. Our usual and customary instruction is verbatim; however, these instructions may vary from job to job. You will be instructed if they ARE to be verbatim; otherwise, just a clean transcription is necessary.

2. When you are typing a sentence, and the person starts off, and then randomly goes off in another direction, you would separate that using a dash, an “em” dash. You will note the setting for using the “em” dash in your MS Word options. Please see below the RIGHT way and the WRONG way to type this:

Right: “Well, I think I feel that – well, let me see. I don’t think that changes.”

Wrong: “Well, I think I feel that-well, let me see. I don’t think that changes.”

It should always be “space – hyphen – space.”

2. Please begin a new paragraph after, at most, 13 lines within a speaker’s narrative. This will look much better and make it easier for the client to read.

3. Remember, if there is only one speaker, you would normally not type a “Speaker.” Simply start typing at the left margin and use paragraphs, as mentioned in No. 2.

4. When you are not certain of the spelling of a name or word, please highlight and use the color “blue” to indicate your uncertainty of the spelling. In addition, please bold it so that it stands out for the client.

5. Make certain to type [End of Audio] at the end of the document at the left margin, and bold that also.

6. Remember to always delete any blank pages at the end of a document.

7. If you simply cannot make out a word or phrase, please use [inaudible], and bold that, as it will make it stand out so the client can fill that in.

8. Remember, there are always TWO spaces after a period. This is standard procedure. Unless otherwise instructed, ALWAYS use two spaces after a period. You can set your spell check properties in MS Word to have spell check look for this improper spacing once you’ve completed the file. Please set it to look for TWO spaces after a period. In fact, go over the properties in spell check and make certain that it will look for almost everything. This will make certain that all spacing, grammar, spelling, etc. is correct.

9. Please, please, please – if you do not know how to spell a famous name, brand, etc., please look it up on the Internet quickly to see if you can find it there. If you cannot, that’s okay; however, the fewer blue-text words, the better.

10. Last, but not least, please proofread your document prior to submitting it to us. This will aid in decreasing OUR time in proofreading your document. This doesn’t mean you have to listen to the audio all over again; however, you should check for errors that you know spell check will not pick up.

For example, the word “form” is a correct word, but if you meant to type “from,” spell check will NOT pick that up. This is an example in this case.

SUMMARY:

Our company is growing more and more each day. If all of you follow these style guidelines, we will be more able to produce a professional-looking document, and all of our documents will look the same, and that is what we want, consistency.

Professional-looking documents make our clients happy, and this is what we want. If they are happy with the documents they receive, they are more likely to remain OUR clients. This, in turn, is not only better for us, but better for you also. The more clients we have, the more money we make, and, in turn, the more money YOU make.

Should you have any questions at any time, please feel free to ask. It is better to ask and get it right than not to ask at all.

You’re all doing a great job so far, and we hope to have you with us for a long time. Please read this over and over. Print it out and use it for reference. Let’s all be consistent for the sakes of our clients, ourselves and YOU!

Thank you!

Compiled by Joyce Warren & Sreekanth Srivastava

Transcription of Interviews or Transcribing Interviews

In my post today I shall describe transcribing interviews. Transcribing interviews involves transcription of interviews of any type to any required & compatible format. That means converting the interviews like legal, marketing, one to one, radio, recruitment, police , and research to a required format is interview transcription.

The recorded interviews are converted to documents which are easily understandable.

Why Transcribe Interviews?

People in business are extremely busy. They don’t have time to do all these conversions. Here’s when transcription vendors step in. You can send your recorded interviews to us via mail or courier. We will convert it in to a document using MS Word, Word perfect or any other format on request by the clients, which will be easily understandable. After converting your interviews to document we will mail the product right back to you. Simple isn’t it.

How?

Before starting up the conversion process, a transcription team listens carefully to the interview recordings. But what happens if your interview recordings are not clear? Don’t worry with the help of specialist editing software we improve recordings that are poorly recorded, perform the conversion word by word and finally prepare the document in MS Word or any format on request by the client. But good transcription vendors do not stop here. Then follows a sequence of quality checks. Finally, we send this file to you via e-mail. The time taken to convert interviews depends upon te length of the interview, but an average one can be done in two and a alf to three hours time, inclusive of the time of uploading and downloading files.
If your request involves secure file encryption, we can provide you with secure transmission on the internet or over your network by utilizing our Export File Transfer facility.

Benefits of transcribing interviews:

• A lot of your time is being saved, which can be used in some other important tasks of your business.
• Money is being saved .You don’t need put employees and offer them hourly wages for doing such conversions.
• You get a quality and useful transcript in short time, from us.

GMR Transcription Services

At GMR we have all hardware facilities, that enable to & fro data movement without any hitches.
GMR has a dedicated workforce dealing primarily with interview transcription service.
There is no problem of accent conversion - British, American, Canadian, Australian we do it all.
Some of our interview transcription facilities are one to one, marketing, focus group, job interviews, surveys, research, TV/radio shows, Press briefing.

Developing Competencies in Business Transcription

Business Transcription is far more subjective than the Medical Transcription as there are no fixed guidelines for a transcript output. Medical Transcription essentially consists of phrases containing medical terminology, where as Business Transcription has no boundaries set, it can range from a Political Interview to spiritual sermon. Transcribing these files is a challenge as the subject lines of these files vary.

General Guidelines:

Business Transcription files should be customer centric. Like we have a Sociology student who interviews people on Social issues. We should be doing some research on this subject to get to know the “Language” they speak.

As soon as we receive the file the Team leader should run through the file to get to know the quality and the “Theme”. The team leader should call for a short 10-minute meeting. He should explain the “Theme” of the file to the transcriptionists. This routine should be religiously followed.

Thinking of the clients, Clients requirement is that they need a document, which is readily usable. They should not be opening the document and doing even small corrections.

Do not strictly stick to the voice verbatim if you are not able to decipher what the speaker is saying. You should be taking a conscious judgment by adding or removing words. See the entire paragraph, if you feel that the word, which you cannot decipher, is not affecting the flow or the “Theme” take liberty to change. Be cautious do not get overboard.

There should not be any blanks in the file. If you are not able to get any cue of what the speaker is saying just keep (?). Even this should not exceed to 10 in one hour file.

File should be time coded & the file should be accompanied with a text file containing the name of the file, total playing time & number of speakers.

Please average out the unusable phrases like for example:

Ummuh….

Okay…. (Laughing)…

Yeah ….


Spell check the entire document for American English. (See the client’s nativity). Do not confirm the grammar suggestions given by the Microsoft Word

Format with Times New Roman font with font size 10 and justified formatting.

After two levels of proofreading, If possible, print entire transcript on a dot matrix printer and proof read on a hardcopy.

All tasks are to be maintained in MS project software for project management. Project profile should be updated every 6 hours. Status of each file, whether it is under transcription/proofing/uploading has to be seen in an instant html dashboard file. This link should be shared with SatNav for monitoring.

Technical:

All systems should be installed with the upgraded sound drivers. If possible some systems should have amplifiers. These amplifiers would amplify feeble voices. This would be useful with the files which were originally recorded poorly.

Noise suppression/ background noise suppression software filters should be used to suppress hissing back background noises

Good network with reasonable bandwidth & secured ftp for file transfers are essential.

Good backup management & reporting policy should be adopted.

Team leader should speak to SatNav facilitator on daily basis

Long-term Competency Building in Business Transcription

Business Transcription is not rocket science, but in order to stay put in this business we need to develop overall competency to deal with any voice file of any subject line. In order to do so, the team should be aware of few things on United States of America

Their History, Civil war, World war, Vietnam, All other Wars, Polity, Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Civil liberty, Blacks, Immigrants, Healthcare, Education, Technology, Social security, Taxes, Judiciary, Capitol Punishments, CNN, New York Times, Larry king, Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno, East Coast , Materialism, West coast, Midwest, Counties, Communities, Women liberation, Homeland security, pentagon, etcetera, etcetera.

What I mean to say is that the Business Transcription Team leader should device a 3 to 4 month program on understanding USA. This training would help the transcriptionists to look for answers themselves on net when they are challenged with variety of subjects. They will have a basic understanding of the “Psyche & the language” they can quickly build on the things they already know.

What Good Transcription Vendors Provide

What services are your transcription vendors providing? How do you know that you are not being taken for a run? Check the list.
Is your vendor
Predictable? Can you plan your transcription costs or is your budget running away?
Affordable? Have you compared the costs with the services provided?
Flexible? Does your vendor offer you more than one option that suits you? Can you change your mind mid way?
Customer Friendly? Does your vendor provide easy to use and understand software?
Qualitative? Does your vendor give quality services? Does your vendor use experienced transcribers who provide quality transcription given the condition of your recording.
Responsible? Gives immediate feedback if some thing is not right and does not wait for you to ask?
Click on the link on your right side to check out our transcription services, we provide all of the above and more!

New Blog!

Welcome to my new blog! In this blog I intend to post / display articles related to transcription services and how the customer should approach a transcription company.