Medical Transcription and Medical Transcriptionist’s Technologies

The Pacman of the medical transcription (MT) world has done it again. For those of you who are just beginning their medical transcription professional career but like to keep close tabs on the industry news, here’s an update: Major medical-transcription firm iMedX Inc., of Shelton, Conn., has gobbled up yet another MT organization; this time it’s the National Medical Transcription LLC (NMT) of Port Washington, N.Y.

The New York firm said that it will soon incorporate its customers into iMedX following the buyout. iMedX, for its part, explained that the buyout will increase its customer base, especially in the Mid-Atlantic region. NMT, which specializes in medical transcription systems, becomes the tenth firm (at least) in the medical software field to be assimilated by iMedX since March 2008.

iMedX is privately held, and is backed by New Canaan, Conn.-based RFE Investment Partners. The company makes the TurboScribe, TurboRecord, TurboRx and TurboFlow medical transcription software products.

The rapid expansion of iMedX reflects the robust health of the medical-transcription industry in the U.S., belying fears that outsourcing is hurting the industry.  It also reflects the industry’s ever-growing reliance on new technology.

One such technology, however, is causing concern among medical transcriptionist. It doesn’t need any medical transcription training, it doesn’t need any coffee breaks, and it sure doesn’t need to get paid. It’s called speech recognition transcription (SRT) software and it’s giving newly-fledged and veteran medical transcriptionists alike an inferiority complex. But should it?

SRT is a child of the computer age we live in. It enables the translation of a voice file into an editable text file in much the same manner that your scanner’s OCR (optical character recognition) magically transforms a page of your book into, say, a .doc file. SRT completely cuts out the traditional middleman, the transcriptionist, from the process. Theoretically, it can make the transcriptionist completely unnecessary, obsolete. But that time has not yet come because the technology to do it is definitely not yet here.

The two main stumbling blocks of SRT in medical transcription are transcription accuracy and medical terminology. To put it simply, it cannot yet transcribe well enough for the job, especially if that job is loaded with medical jargon. SRT, at this stage, simply makes too many mistakes to be considered reliable. In one recent study, in fact, over 600 radiology reports were transcribed, half by a medical transcriptionist, half by SRT. The SRT reports returned an error rate 800 percent higher than the transcriptionist’s report.

At Meditec.com, a premier provider of many online courses (including pharmacy technician courses, medical billing and coding training, and medical office management training), reliability and accuracy are focus points of its medical transcription training program. They will serve well the aspirant medical transcriptionist in a future that will see SRT attempt to make inroads in the medical transcription world.