subject: Dictation Transcription [print this page] Dr. Campbell uses a palm held digital voice recorder for dictating patients medical profile into it, the doctor works for a well known hospital in Louisiana. The doctors day starts early morning visiting his patients in the hospital, just after examining the patient the diagnosis is dictated into the digital voice recorder.
At an average the doctor visits 40 odd patients everyday and the handy digital voice recorder has been his partnering tool for a couple of years now. The dictations are documented by a medical transcription company based overseas. Many doctors follow a similar methodology for dictations and for most of them the palm held digital voice recorder is as important as a stethoscope, without which dictation transcriptions will not be possible.
There were many doctors who experimented with voice recognition software, but were sorely disappointed using it because it has many inadequacies especially when it comes to accurately recognizing medical terms, the doctors have to re-edit portions of the medical reports because of which precious time was lost on account of this, therefore they have reverted back to using the digital voice recorder.
The digital voice recorder works with a software installed on a personal computer, and all dictations recorded on it are transferred on to the computer, these are then accessed by medical transcriber, either available in-house or located overseas. If the dictation transcription is solicited from overseas vendors, a high speed internet is used for setting up a remote access file transfer protocol with the overseas vendor.
The recent legislations on sourcing services from vendors based overseas has had no impact whatsoever, the doctors are reluctant to setup in-house services because of the cost factor. The companies based overseas charge 9 to 10 for a 65 character line, whereas doing it in-house cost doctors anywhere from 30 to 35. The price variation can make a huge difference on annual savings of operational costs of many clinics or healthcare companies. This is the reason why dictation transcriptions are being solicited from service providers based in India or Philippines.
