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Sunday, March 5, 2017

How to Become a Medical Transcriptionist

The Basics

Medical transcriptionists create reports and other administrative documents from physicians’ dictated recordings. In addition to transcribing, you’ll edit information for grammar errors and proper usage of medical terms in a patient’s records. You’ll need an in-depth knowledge of medical terminology, anatomy, medical procedures and treatments, and pharmacology—as well as a high degree of attention to detail. Medical transcriptionists must also be aware of the legal standards and requirements that apply to health records.

Where you’ll work: Hospitals, clinics, physicians’ offices, nursing homes, public health agencies and home health care agencies. Some medical transcriptionists work at home as employees of transcription businesses or as independent contractors.

Education and Training

In addition to your degree, you’ll need to complete a certified medical transcription training program, usually a 6-month to the 2-year certificate, diploma or associate’s degree program.

Graduates must understand medical terms, their meanings, spelling, and pronunciation, and possess hands-on transcription experience.

Coursework generally includes the following subjects:

    English composition and grammar

    Computer applications

    Medical terminology

    Pathology

    Anatomy and physiology

    Medical transcription skills

Medical Transcriptionist Certification

Certification is optional but highly recommended. Medical transcriptionists who pass the national exam given by the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) will earn the title Certified Medical Transcriptionist (CMT). Every 3 years, CMTs must earn continuing education credits to be re-certified.

Source: allalliedhealthschools.com

HEALTHCARE AND NURSING JOBS YOU CAN DO AT HOME

Work-at-home jobs are all the rage right now, but if you’re a nurse or other healthcare worker, you probably think WAH isn’t an option for you. Guess again, because there are more and more healthcare and nursing jobs being introduced for those who want to or need to work at home.

The Top Non-Nursing WAH Jobs

Probably the easiest WAH medical job to break into is medical transcription. Many people already do WAH transcription from audio recordings without any formal training, so breaking into medical transcription is a matter of either having a background in healthcare that makes you familiar with the terminology or taking courses to tackle that complex lingo from doctors. Allied Health Schools recommends you need to complete a six-month to a two-year training course in addition to having a high school diploma, but if you have transcription experience, healthcare experience, or a combination of both, you may find entry-level jobs that will work with you before completing a training course and certification.

However, if you want to get into WAH medical billing and coding, you will need a certification in almost any job you apply for, including entry-level positions. There are different levels of certification and in the first level, you can apply to take the test without formal training if you have experience doing medical coding. That will be rare unless you are a semi-retired or retired nurse looking to switch careers and have extensive coding experience working as a case manager or an MDS nurse in long-term care. But yes, you’ll still need to take that test and get certified.

Bear in mind that some medical coding programs can take as long as getting a basic nursing certification to become an LPN if you have an interest in becoming a nurse. However, you’ll be hard-pressed to find LPN jobs you can do from home. Almost all work-at-home nursing jobs go to a higher level of nursing, Registered Nurses, or RNs.

Can You Really Work At Home As A Nurse?

When most people think of nursing, they think of hands-on care and wonder what a nurse can do from a home office. Some people consider working as a home health case manager as a WAH position, but that’s not really the case as home health case managers have to go into the office daily as well as attend meetings and care conferences in addition to their actual patient visits. Fortis notes that one exception to that rule would be the after-hours triage nurse, who goes on-call when the office closes and the case managers go home for the day.

An after-hours nurse works from their home, taking calls from the telephone triage nurse when calls from patients come in needing assistance. If the telephone triage nurse can’t handle the problem over the phone, he or she will call the nurses working after-hours to have them make a visit and address the issue. Nurses who work exclusively doing after-hours work do not have a patient caseload, so they are not required to attend patient care conferences or make regularly scheduled visits. They simply work their shifts from home, waiting for the next call.

It’s an unpredictable job position as some nights the on-call or after-hours nurse will be busy all night, or other nights there may only be one or two calls all night. You just never know.

WAH Nursing By Telephone

You may have noticed that the after-hours nurse receives their assignments from the telephone triage nurse. With a few exceptions where home health or hospice companies require their triage nurses to be on site to take calls, the telephone triage nurse is generally a true WAH position. Like the on-call nurse that makes visits, this can be very unpredictable, so you may be receiving calls one after another all night from 5 p.m. to when the office opens the next morning, or you may only have a couple of calls. Many home health and hospice companies also go by a schedule of seven days on and seven days off for their after-hours staff, particularly the telephone triage nurse who never goes out to make visits.

Companies like IntellaTriage handle triage calls for multiple hospices all over the country, so you can expect to stay fairly busy even at night, but also you will have to learn multiple systems for the different hospice agencies. That includes their electronic charting and their protocols. Don’t be surprised if each individual hospice you’re covering has a different script for simply answering the phone. If you’re very organized and set your WAH office up the right way, this isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds. Tip: keep your phone in a space big enough that you can have printouts of each script right by the phone, surrounding it. (IntellaTriage’s phone system shows which hospice is calling on the caller-ID before you pick up so you know which script to use.)

You’ll have to carry a lot of nursing licenses and you will probably need to reside in one of the nursing compact states to cover a wide territory, plus get licenses in states such as Florida, California, and more depending on where each agency being serviced is located. Also, note this agency does not have a triaging script. You will be relying on your own knowledge and individual company protocols for advising clients, unlike most insurance nurse hotline jobs.

WAH Nurse Hotline Jobs

If you want an alternative to doing telephone triage for a home health or hospice agency, you can also work from home for an insurance company nurse hotline. These lines operate 24/7/365 so a daytime schedule is possible. However, expect to spend some time paying your dues working evenings and nights for a while until daytime positions open up as they are in demand.

Carenet, based in San Antonio, manages multiple insurance company nurse hotlines, and you must do your training on site in San Antonio over the course of two weeks. Once your training is complete, if you aren’t local to San Antonio, you proceed directly to working from home. If you are local and able to go into the call center, you start out working on-site and become eligible to move to WAH based on performance.

You also have to show that you have a work space that meets HIPAA privacy guidelines for handling healthcare information. That means having a separate lockable room for your computer and any documents related to work, even if you live alone. You must have high-speed, secure internet access. Also, be forewarned that there are expectations for the amount of time you take to finish calls and the average number of calls you take per hour. If you are not on a call for more than two minutes, don’t be surprised if you get a text message from the shift supervisor wondering why you aren’t taking the next call.

Nurses use a computer program that presents a series of questions starting with the most critical scenario down to the least severe. You will be expected to ask the questions in exact order and not deviate from that recommendation script. All the questions are yes/no questions, and when the caller answers “yes,” it tells you what recommendations to give. You must follow this protocol to the letter.

The work-at-home trend now includes healthcare, so even if you thought working from your home office was nothing more than a dream, there are options for nurses and other medical staff to make a big change that can balance your personal and professional lives.

Source: http://www.inquisitr.com

Friday, March 3, 2017

History of Medical Transcription

Medical Records are not a new invention

Records have been kept on patient care since people first developed the ability to write. At the beginning of the 20th century, stenographers entered the scene who took the doctor’s dictation in shorthand. This method was used until the invention of audio recording.

With that ability, doctors would talk into a mic, record their report and a transcriptionist would type it up on a mechanical typewriter, and the paperwork filed in the patient chart.

The Evolution of Medical Transcription Technologies

Dictabelts and Dictaphone Transcribers

Note the blue plastic circular “Dictabelt,” which was cut by a needle in the dictation process, much like the old 45 and later music records.

Dictabelt

Most hospitals used the Dictaphone plastic belts. They slipped onto a cylinder in the transcriber unit and moved it forward and backward with a foot pedal.

Typewriters

Typewriters like the IBM Selectric typewriter were a wonderful improvement over the mechanical typewriters since it allowed you to insert a tape and hit a typo error then type over it to make the correction.

They also had a stroke counter so you could multiply the strokes by 5 to get a word count, which was how many transcribers would charge for their services.

Birth of Remote Dictation

The first remote dial-in systems consisted of an approximate 3’x3’x6” box with miles of recording tape inside and recorder-coupler-connected to a couple of telephone lines. The dictator would call in, hear a beep, then dictate.

Word Processors

With paper tape about one inch wide, each keystroke on a typewriter punched a hole in the tape. Once a document was completed the tape was fed through a reader to produce the printed output.

When the tape tore, which was often, a splicer was provided allowing the operator to neatly glue the tape back together.

Computer Processors

In the mid-80s came a major breakthrough with computer word processors. When the first word processors with the 8088 chip emerged, combined with WordPerfect 4.0 and Pro-Comm (software), transcriptionists were able to be more productive and move files from their site to customers’ offices.

DOS (with Windows) was used in the word processing business (and virtually everything else for a time). The word processing software that was primarily used at the time was WordPerfect, however, Microsoft figured out how to get an edge so MSWord became the standard for transcription.

Hooking a computer to a modem then allowed pools of transcriptionists to access remote customers who had their own dictation systems. Dialing into a hospital several thousand miles away, transcribing the records and digitally sending them for in-house printing was a huge milestone.

Word processing software as well as incorporating templates and word expanders greatly increased productivity.

Voice Dictation

In the late 1980s, voice recognition was introduced. It allowed computer software to translate a voice record into a digital report; however, with all of the idiosyncracies of medical dictation and its various dictators (slow vs fast speaking, non-native-English speaking doctors) created a huge error margin. Then the transcriptionist became an editor who would review the digital record, often listening to the voice record to edit the completed file.

Current Politics in Healthcare Affecting Transcription

The last few years, the Electronic Medical Records, now mandated by law, and its various failures makes the healthcare news on a daily basis. Many vendors jumped into the arena and sold software to providers (hospitals, doctors, etc.). However, since no common standard was ever developed or required, none of the systems talk to each other which eliminates the primary reason they were developed – easy access to a centralized record = better patient care.

Clearly, digitalizing medical records and managing control access presents huge opportunities for successful career considerations. Medical transcriptionists have a huge knowledge of medical terms and of medicine generally, including anatomy, physiology, pharmacy, diseases, disease processes, laboratory procedures, x-ray and radiological procedures, and surgery have become major interpreters in the health information system and medical records documentation. Their contribution to healthcare is enormous.

Wherever medical records migrate, medical transcriptionists will be in the vanguard.

Source: www.med-certification.com

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Global Medical Transcription It Spending Market Will Grow Steadily At A CAGR Of 6.48% During The Period 2016-2020

The process of medical transcription involves documentation of medical records from voice to text formats. Physicians record patient details in audio formats, which is sent to a transcriptionist to decode and store in a digital format. The clinical documentation solution is implemented to preserve patient records in text formats using digital technologies, to deliver quality patient care with high accuracy. Medical transcription documents are stored, shared, and exchanged by healthcare providers through integrated healthcare information systems.

Technavios analysts forecast the global medical transcription IT spending market to grow at a CAGR of 6.48% during the period 2016-2020.

Covered in this report
The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global medical transcription IT spending market for 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated through the transactions of medical transcription software, hardware and IT services.

The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:
Americas
APAC
EMEA

To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @ www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=775765

Technavio's report, Global Medical Transcription IT Spending Market 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

Key vendors
Acusis
iMedX
MModal
Nuance Communications
Precyse

Other prominent vendors
Accuro
Amphion Medical
Bytescribe
Ascend Healthcare Systems
DICT8
Global Medical Transcription
3M
Scribe Healthcare Technologies
Sterling Transcription
Transtech Medical Solutions
Voxtab

Market driver
Need for digital healthcare ecosystem
For a full, detailed list, view our report

Market challenge
System integration and interoperability issues
For a full, detailed list, view our report

Market trend
Increased adoption of m-health solutions
For a full, detailed list, view our report

Key questions answered in this report
What will the market size be in 2020 and what will the growth rate be?
What are the key market trends?
What is driving this market?
What are the challenges to market growth?
Who are the key vendors in this market space?
What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?

Make an Enquiry of this report @ www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=775765

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