Confidentiality Is A Necessity In Medical Transcription Services
Medical transcription services outsourcing and medical risk management are at times closely related topics. Risk management involves minimizing the risk involved in the patient healthcare process, while medical transcription is the act of creating patient records from the audio narration of a healthcare professional and their encounter with a patient. The process of creating patient medical records is one that requires sensitive handling and could very well affect risk management factors.
It is a fact that the patient/physician relationship is private and is founded on the basis of the healthcare professional/ facilities ability to maintain the confidentiality of the privileged patients information. Protecting the confidentiality of patient information is not only a moral obligation, but is also mandated by law. HIPAA has provided specific guidelines for protecting all patient information. While outsourcing medical transcription services has been proven to be one of the most efficient, effective and economical way of creating patient records, handing over private patient information to a third party service provider raises some apprehensions regarding patient security.
Concerns about this procedure can be alleviated by choosing the medical transcription services vendor you will use with care. This simply ensures that the vendor:
- Is well versed with the requirements of HIPAA/ HITECH
- Has provisions in place to ensure total security
Ensuring that the entity entrusted with the responsibility of creating patient medical records is HIPAA / HITECH compliant will also help with the process of risk management.
How does outsourced medical transcription services help in the process of risk management, you ask? To understand how this helps in risk management it is important to understand the principles of risk management and how outsourced transcription plays into the process. The principles of risk management are as follows:
- Create value to a patient
- Be an integral part of the organizational process
- Be a part of the decision making
- Explicitly address uncertainty in patients
- Be systematic and structured
- Take into account human factors
- Be transparent and inclusive to the patient
- Be dynamic and responsive to change
- Offer continual improvement and enhancement
These services help healthcare facilities in the risk management process by fulfilling all of the principles of risk management during the process of documenting the patient encounter. It ensures that:
- Medical transcription records are created with utmost accuracy. It ensures this by using teams who are specialists in the fields they are providing medical transcription services for. Further quality is ensured by having a multi-level quality check for accuracy. The information captured in the patient records needs to be accurate as it becomes a part of evidence in case of malpractice litigation.
- Medical transcription services records are created on time. Optimum turnaround time is ensured by using the right team, the right process, and the right technology. This ensures that healthcare professionals have the information needed for formulating plans for the patient's healthcare. This also helps in managing risks of a patient.
- Medical transcription services records are created securely. Another aspect of risk management is protecting the confidentiality of patient information. Help is provided in this aspect by having measures in place to protect patient information by securing people, process and technology.
Outsourcing medical transcription services to the right service provider not only helps healthcare facilities in aspects of risk management, it also helps the healthcare facilities save on costs, increase focus on core business and help provide multiple benefits by using the right technology.
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- affordable, audio transcription, cheap, dictation, dictation services, efficiency, productivity, transcription, transcription service, transcription services, medical transcription services
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- 11 Years Ago
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