The medical field is one of the main industries that stands to significantly benefit from specialized professional transcription services. It all comes down to the time and money that can be spared with a high-pressure profession that often finds staff working overtime due to the demanding nature of the job.
In outsourcing the routine, yet important task of transcribing everyday duties, healthcare practices can enjoy a myriad of associated advantages. Texts like patient discharge summaries, medical histories or research interviews can all be handed over to a transcription service, and valuable staff time can be freed up immediately. Doing this can mean immediate improvements in the workplace; from lower staff turnover and burnout rates, to higher productivity and increased job satisfaction.
That said, in order to get the most out of a medical transcription service, it is paramount to ensure it adheres to the highest level of confidentiality. At TranscribeMe, we take information security very seriously and enforce the following measures to guarantee our work complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA):
1. Infrastructure and Network Security
Our servers can be found within the secure walls of Microsoft Azure data centers that employ the most advanced techniques to prevent both physical and online intrusion. These constantly monitored facilities are also ISO certified and maintained around the clock with the latest security updates. Working with these world renowned data centers provides us with the complete uptime reliability for our services.
2. Micro-Tasking and Confidentiality
As an extra measure to ensure confidentiality, we have developed a custom micro-tasking algorithm to breakdown audio or video files into snippets for random assigning to our transcribers. In this way, no one transcriber will have more than a fraction of a single job nor can they access the entire job or identify the client.
3. Quality-Assurance Security Measures
All of the content uploaded to and exchanged with our work delivery platform is encrypted for additional security. In fact, we use the same algorithms as those applied to safeguard financial data in online banking transactions. Through the use of our specialized platform, transcribers have access to our most advanced transcription and translation tools without permitting any downloading or storage of data offline. Before assigning any jobs, our transcribers must first have passed a series of tests for quality and efficiency in advance.
4. Geo-Location and Fencing
We work with a number of clients that have strict requirements for their confidential information to remain within their countries’ borders. This is often the case for most customers located in the UK, Canada or Australia. We are able to accommodate these needs thanks to geo-location, which can limit the human and machine-based processing of content to users within a pre-specified geographical location. Geo-fencing provides the added benefit of filtering a job assignment to transcribers with the required technical expertise.
5. Advanced Enterprise Confidentiality
Where extra sensitive information is involved, we can provide a background-check service for all the employees on the assigned project and also share their resumes with the client. Under these circumstances, we would require advance planning to be able to carry out these individual security checks prior to starting any work. Should the signing of a non-disclosure agreement or any other associated legal contract be necessary, our transcribers are familiar with the process and can accommodate accordingly.
6. Keeping it In-House When and Where Necessary
Sometimes information can be too sensitive to share with any external employees even if they’ve cleared our own security checks. Should this be the case, our customers always have the ability to exclusively process their own content in-house. Their staff will have access to all the tools made available through our secure online platform, including partial support using advanced speech recognition algorithms.
7. HIPAA Compliance
Fully trained medical transcriptionists are always subject to the business associate requirements per HIPAA’s privacy legislation. This, in turn, means that we are subject to that same requirement because our transcribers perform a function on behalf of healthcare providers which includes the disclosure and handling of Personal Health Information (PHI).
As such, they are strictly prohibited from using or sharing PHI in any manner that could violate the privacy rule. Moreover, these security standards apply to any information that is digitally stored or transmitted. Wherever PHI is to be processed by a transcriber, they are required to utilize chain-of-trust agreements to fulfill their obligation to maintain the integrity and confidentiality of the information during its transmission.
With these seven security measures in place, we are able to guarantee your information will be handled with utmost care and confidentiality at TranscribeMe. Staying on top of the latest security trends and requirements helps us ensure correct HIPAA compliance while delivering highly accurate and timely results.
Interested to know more about our best-in-class medical transcription services? Reach out to our sales team with any further questions – we’d be happy to assist you!
