Choosing a medical transcription service that you can trust provides enormous benefit to your practice or organization. Companies that specialize in delivering speech-to-text transcriptions provide significant cost savings over creating transcripts in-house, and give you the ability to focus on your core business rather than investing valuable time and energy on hiring and managing a team of transcriptionists. Outsourcing to a competent medical transcription provider will save time and money while freeing up administrative resources.
In the medical space, it is important to be cautious when outsourcing transcription since you are likely dealing with sensitive data that may contain personal health information (PHI). Finding the right transcription vendor can be tricky, but this guide will help you understand what to look for in a provider and how to make sure they are compliant with standards from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).
Benefits of Using a Medical Transcription Provider vs Doing Transcripts In-House
At first glance you would think that utilizing in-house staff to take care of your transcription needs would be a more secure and efficient way to generate and maintain your transcripts. This is wrong. The reality is that generating transcriptions in-house is less-secure, more expensive, and utilizes greater resources versus outsourcing the work to a professional transcription provider.
Security Issues
Maintaining proper HIPAA compliance across all the processes within your organization is difficult and there are many instances where violations may occur. This is especially true with transcription. If your in-house transcriptionists are not using specialized software dedicated to transcribe data containing PHI, or are not properly trained in handling and processing audio/text data containing PHI, it is easy to have user errors or lapses in judgment that result in HIPAA violations. Likewise, if you do not set up your end-to-end technology infrastructure in a way that ensures HIPAA compliance, you are likely opening yourself up to violations.
Shockingly, HIPAA violations from covered entities happen fairly frequently, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). However, this data is just from what was reported. It wouldn’t be surprising if many more unreported HIPAA violations occur every year due to poorly managed internal processes or employees covering up mistakes, or from organizations that don’t want to risk a fine for committing these violations.
Credible transcription companies, on the other hand, have dedicated workflows and processes in place to ensure HIPAA compliance every step of the way. The firms dedicated to HIPAA compliance will build their technology infrastructure around a variety of methods that ensure the highest level of information security, including the following:
- End-to-end encryption of data in-transit and at rest
- Limited access to data containing PHI only to appropriate users
- Deleting data from servers after a certain period of time
- Careful vetting of workers and employees that have access to sensitive data
- A culture and experience in working with PHI data
Companies that dedicate themselves to HIPAA compliance will prioritize their R&D and deployment efforts to maintain this compliance, and with the appropriate legal contracts in place will ensure that your data is more secure than performing these services in-house.
Cost Issues & Productivity Losses
There are two ways for medical transcripts to be generated in-house; either with internal staff doing the work themselves, or dedicated transcriptionists/medical scribes. Transcription is a skill set that anyone can do, but requires extensive training and experience to do well and be efficient.
Professional medical transcriptionists or scribes will be effective and deliver accurate transcripts in a timely manner. The drawback is that these folks also typically command very expensive per hour rates, and will also increase your employee headcount which will also increase your fixed costs. The cost difference will likely be several orders of magnitude higher to bring professional transcriptionists in-house and you will not see significantly better productivity or accuracy.
By outsourcing to a medical transcription service, you will receive a menu of pricing options that are typically billed at a per audio minute rate. Due to economies-of-scale, transcription services will generally be able to offer pricing that will come out to 50%-80% more affordable than in-house transcriptionists. They will be able to handle any volume and most charge only for the amount of minutes ordered. Internal staff will cost you the same amount every month and there is a limit to how much work they can do without incurring additional costs for overtime pay. A transcription provider can scale up or down as needed without incurring these additional fees. It just makes more sense financially to outsource this work to an appropriate vendor.
Efficiency & Accuracy
Staff not trained or experienced in performing transcription work will take significant time and energy to create proper transcripts, keeping them from doing other valuable work. Additionally, while transcribing, it is difficult to maintain focus and if your staff is not experienced or does not enjoy the work, they will burn out quickly.
Companies that specialize in delivering medical transcription services have dedicated sourcing, training, onboarding, and maintenance of workers and are able to source transcriptionists from a wide variety of locations.This provides an advantage in that these companies can work with you to deliver exactly what you need when you need it.
Most of these companies also have specialized transcription platforms allowing them to return transcripts faster and more efficiently while maintaining control over the data and ensuring the highest possible quality.
Top Questions to Ask Potential Medical Transcription Services
It is important to properly vet any potential vendor to make sure they have the necessary processes and protocols in place to provide a truly HIPAA compliant service. By properly vetting transcription vendors and having the right legal agreements in place, you can ensure that your organization is properly indemnified against HIPAA violations committed by any Business Associate. In order to properly vet a potential vendor, you should be asking the following questions:
1. Will you sign a Business Associates Agreement (BAA)?
The answer to this must be a YES. A company not willing to sign a BAA does not have the confidence in their own processes to deliver a truly HIPAA compliant service. As a Covered Entity, you should have a BAA that you send to a potential vendor for signature. If you do not have a BAA, the HHS has resources to help out here.
2. How is my audio/video data handled and accessed? Where is it stored and maintained?
There are two ways for medical transcripts to be generated in-house; either with internal staff doing the work themselves, or dedicated transcriptionists/medical scribes. Transcription is a skill set that anyone can do, but requires extensive training and experience to do well and be efficient.
Professional medical transcriptionists or scribes will be effective and deliver accurate transcripts in a timely manner. The drawback is that these folks also typically command very expensive per hour rates, and will also increase your employee headcount which will also increase your fixed costs. The cost difference will likely be several orders of magnitude higher to bring professional transcriptionists in-house and you will not see significantly better productivity or accuracy.
By outsourcing to a medical transcription service, you will receive a menu of pricing options that are typically billed at a per audio minute rate. Due to economies-of-scale, transcription services will generally be able to offer pricing that will come out to 50%-80% more affordable than in-house transcriptionists. They will be able to handle any volume and most charge only for the amount of minutes ordered. Internal staff will cost you the same amount every month and there is a limit to how much work they can do without incurring additional costs for overtime pay. A transcription provider can scale up or down as needed without incurring these additional fees. It just makes more sense financially to outsource this work to an appropriate vendor.
3. Do you provide accuracy guarantees and how do you ensure the transcripts are accurate?
Every company will tell you they will guarantee accuracy, but understanding how their process works and what they will do to ensure that accuracy is delivered consistently is key. This is also where you should be weary of very low cost providers. This industry is very much a “get what you pay for” type of business, so do not commit yourself to long term contracts or volume guarantees before a company has demonstrated competency and consistency.
4. How do you source and train your transcriptionists?
An unfortunate reality of the transcription industry is that many companies source their transcriptionists from low-cost countries. While there are plenty of folks in these countries that have decent fluency with English and are willing to accept low wages, this creates an atmosphere and incentive structure that prioritizes speed of transcription completion over accuracy of the end-product. It is important when vetting companies to get an understanding of where they source their transcriptionists and whether they are able or willing to geofence their workforce to countries with native speakers.
Why the TranscribeMe Medical Transcription Service is the Best
At TranscribeMe, we strive to provide the highest quality medical transcription, delivered quickly and at the lowest cost. We have built a proprietary workforce management platform that combines the latest in speech recognition technology paired with the best in human intelligence. This enables us to deliver HIPAA compliant workflows with the industry’s highest information security protocols and standards.
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Additionally, we primarily source our workforce in North America and have a robust training, QA, and career path for workers. This allows us to create incentive structures for workers to deliver consistent high quality output. We work with most major hospital networks and universities that require HIPAA compliant transcription processes and know what it takes to deliver the best quality data at scale.
We are also transparent in our processes, flexible in how we can set up teams of workers to facilitate your needs, and ensure that only the best quality transcriptionists are assigned to work on your data. Please contact us to learn more.
Lastly, our biggest priority is the safety and the security of your data. Data is stored and maintained in the United States, workers that have access to your data must sign a BAA, and we even have a standard practice of deleting your data within 30 days upon project completion as an added layer of security.
