Quality is a major factor to be considered in healthcare documentation. In medical transcription that involves voice to text conversion, quality is measured by the clarity, consistency, accuracy and comprehensiveness of patient healthcare documentation.
The important goals in the quality analysis process are:
- Good documentation through identification and explanation of various types of errors.
- Evaluate error patterns found and improve transcriptionist skills.
QUALITY ASSESSMENT BASIS
The assessment should be made on the basis of aspects such as:
- Voice capture
- Voice-to-text conversion
- Voice and text distribution
- Management support
QUALITY ASSESSMENT PERSONNEL
The quality assessment personnel required in a medical transcription company are:
- Medical Transcriptionists
- Quality Editors
- Quality Manager
In its Statement on Quality Assessment for Medical Transcription, the AAMT (American Association for Medical Transcription) has classified transcription errors in the following manner.
- Critical Errors:
Those errors which impact patient safety such as medical term misuse, incorrect drug or drug dosage, wrong lab values and test names, omitted dictation, patient identification error.
- Major Errors:
Errors which impact document integrity, which include medical word misspelling, English word misspelling, failure to flag a document, abuse of flagging documents, protocol failures.
- Minor Errors:
These include grammar, punctuation, typographical errors, and various formatting errors.
- Dictation Flaws:
These have been classified into critical, major, and minor as defined by patient safety and document integrity impact. In medical transcription it is very important to understand the impact of the voice quality of dictation on the transcript.
In order to ensure quality in transcription, all transcribed text should pass 3 levels of checking done by editors, proofreaders, and medical editors to provide 99% accuracy. Transcription should be done using good quality software. So outsourcing the job to a good medical transcription company can ensure you good quality accurate reports at affordable pricing.
