Notes

Medical Transcription Business
The Case For Medical Transcription Credentialing
Got Credentials?
Now more than ever before, it is becoming very evident that the MT workforce ought to be moving towards mandatory credentialing. In late 2012, a settlement was reached that awarded 140 million dollars to a southern woman's family due to an incorrect insulin dosage that was not caught in her medical record.

This landmark case has brought worldwide attention to the fact that medical records are part and parcel of a patient's medical care and ultimate wellbeing. The insulin dosage was incorrectly noted as 80 units by way of a speech engine when actually the girl was on a dose of 8 units of insulin.
The report experienced several MTs and also QA no one caught the error. The physician never saw the report and in fact had not been aware that the transcription had been done not only by another transcription service but one overseas.
The patient was used in another hospital together with the erroneous medical record, where she received 80 units of insulin rather than 8, which ultimately led to complications resulting in her death.
The Case for a Credentialed Workforce

Could this grievous error have already been avoided other ways? Certainly--had a nurse noted the amount and questioned it, if a doctor had reviewed the record perhaps disaster could have been avoided. The truth though is that no one did catch the error and the best responsible party will be the physician who didn't sign the record and the transcription service who perpetrated the error.

Would credentialing cut down on critical patient safety errors in medical records? This author (who has been around the medical transcription business for nearly 40 years) believes emphatically yes. CPSEs are on the rise today as are major errors in medical records. As a high QA editor for a big company, I caught and flagged probably at least 25 per day. That is clearly a staggering amount considering that individuals doing the transcription are considered qualified already!
Among the problems in the MT industry today is that the workforce is paid on production. If you don't produce, you don't get paid. This leads to errors in and of itself.

The other problem within the industry today isn't as easily understood by many. The advent of speech engines and voice recognition technology is a superb boon to the workforce doing medical transcription. However, with it comes a higher price tag--the propensity for errors to occur and very easily.

MTs are faced with paragraph after paragraph of text that "looks" right but could have several critical patient safety errors interspersed within the text. A physically taxing job before, MT work now has moved to the mentally taxing. It's an acquired skill that will require someone to concentrate on a screen for at the very least 8 hours each day reading from left to right, watching the bouncing cursor and considering every single syllable that is presented on the screen. Taking one's mind off the screen or being distracted for even 1 nanosecond often means the difference between catching one rather than catching an error--80 versus 8.


Add to that the fact that medicine is an ever-changing arena with new drugs, new procedures, new instruments and techniques coming into play every single day and you have a profession which should carry with it an exceptionally high level of sophistication and qualification.
However, up to the present time, there have been relatively few transcription services who reward their workers for having credentials of RMT (registered medical transcriptionist) or CMT (certified medical transcriptionist). Even fewer hire only credentialed transcriptionists.

So what's the difference? Does credentialing mean you should have less errors in medical records?

My Website: http://www.kandsmedicaltranscription.com/