Medical transcription plays an important role in the healthcare process by transforming dictated audio files into patient records that provide complete healthcare documentation. Patient records are an amazing resource for healthcare professionals to draw information from, for various purposes. Patient records are basically the chronicle of events of the patient's medical history, including the demographics, the initial complaint, examination, the diagnosis, result of tests/procedures,the medication/ treatment prescribed, the progress made by the patient and the record of healthcare instructions given to the patient for continued care.

All these information are skillfully captured by the process of medical transcription accurately, made available within short turnaround times, transmitted through secure channels using different modes of document delivery as desired by the healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities. This process is the culmination of the right people, the right processes and the right technology. As the activity of creating patient medical records is not a part of the core business of the healthcare facility, the easy fix to ensure speedy, accurate and secure creation of patient records is to outsource the entire process to a outsourced service provider.

Outsourcing also helps improve the cashflow of the healthcare facility.

How does outsourcing improve the cashflow of the healthcare facility?

Outsourced services help improve the cashflow of healthcare facilities in the following ways:

Bringing down the cost of transcription: One of the main benefit of availing the services of a professional transcription vendor is that of bringing down the direct and indirect cost of patient medical record creation significantly. Obtaining the services of a professional vendor brings down the cost per line of transcription by about 40%. Overheads that would have been incurred due to in-house work would be redirected to the core business, thus improving productivity and profits.

Increasing the productivity of healthcare professionals and support staff: Availing the services of a professional transcription vendor essentially provides support to healthcare professionals and support staff by providing services with numerous added benefits.

1. Benefits like allowing healthcare professionals to use flexible and familiar modes of dictation enables them to optimize their time to concentrate more on providing care to patients which results in increased productivity.

2. Software and tools to enable automatic upload of audio files helps improve the productivity of information technology staff.

3. Multiple modes of document delivery improves the efficiency of healthcare professionals performance.

4. Archive facilities helps improve the efficiency of support staff.

5. HL7 interface helps in protecting investment in EMR systems

The increased productivity resulting from outsourcing medical transcription helps save on time, efforts and results in better revenues due to increase and improvement in services

Providing the basis for reimbursements: Accurate and timely documentation aids in the reimbursement process. Accurate information regarding the diagnostic process is important to justify the treatment and this helps in claiming payments. Creation of patient records on a timely basis ensures that the coding and billing can take place on time and this accelerates the reimbursement process, thus improving cashflow.

Protecting against litigation: Patient records not only play a valuable role in the treatment and reimbursement process, they are also an important component of risk management. Litigation is a complex and costly process and patient records provide valuable support in this process.

Outsourcing medical transcription to a service provider with a combination of the right team, the right processes and the right technology can provide numerous benefits to healthcare facilities one of the main being improved cashflow.