Medical Transcription Market Update


Vol. 11 •Issue 9 • Page 31
Medical Transcription Market Update

Companies describe their top priorities for the coming year.

In August 2007, ADVANCE asked companies in the medical transcription market to provide our readers with a capsule summary of their top priorities in terms of product/service evolution over the next 12 months. The following eight companies answered our query. The responses appear in the order they were received.

You can use this information as a starting point for more in-depth discussions with any of these companies or others in the medical transcription field.

MxSecure

“Over the past few years, MxSecure has grown from a small regional corporation into one of the largest providers of medical transcription services to clinics nationwide,” said Colin Christie, president and CEO of MxSecure. “Our core product, MxTranscribe EHR, is one of the most functional and affordable medical transcription and health document management systems on the market today. Why? Because we’re always improving the product in tune with our user feedback, especially when industry care standards are at stake.”

According to Christie, MxSecure’s focus over the next 12 months will be on growing its customer base and improving product offerings.

“One specific area worth mentioning is CDA, or Clinical Document Architecture,” said Christie.

“This year we’ll be looking to expand the functionality of MxTranscribe to support the new CDA standard,” he said. “This will allow MxTranscribe subscribers to extract useful clinical care information from their choice of transcribed documents. Extracts can be stored and retrieved through MxTranscribe; they can also be used to populate existing EMR systems.”

Christie added that compliance with CDA standards allows for more effective and efficient information sharing between health care organizations, “which can be critical to reducing delays in patient care and in managing associated patient care costs.”

Christie concluded, “We plan to lead by example and become CDA-compliant as quickly as possible. We’ll release more information as it becomes available.”

Heartland Information Services

“As we listen to our clients, one thing we hear loud and clear is that there is a need for high-quality transcription that provides outstanding data integrity,” said a spokesperson for Heartland Information Services. “Quality documents delivered with data integrity allow our clients to enhance their reimbursement processes and provide them with accurate information that can be helpful in making decisions regarding services.”

The spokesperson continued, “We have some of the strictest and most demanding definitions and scoring systems in the industry and that helps enable high quality and data integrity. So our first priorities are always to deliver quality, timely, responsive service. Any new product or service evolution would help us accomplish this for our clients.”

The company also stated a goal of achieving significant growth. “We are constantly working to grow capacity while balancing that with the need to continue to meet the quality commitments and expectations for our clients,” the spokesperson explained.

Acusis

According to Acusis CEO David Iwinski, Jr., over the next 12 months, Acusis will focus on three key items in the range of services and products offered to the company’s clients:

1) Further development of the total hybrid production capabilities that Acusis has in place. “We can now offer dedicated U.S. or Indian transcriptionists as desired by our customers,” explained Iwinski. “Clients may now determine, based on issues of turnaround time or pricing, where their production will be located.”

2) The implementation of AcuSuite 3.0, the company’s core operating platform. “The revised version will be an ASP model allowing for a greater ease of implementation of new acquisitions as well as offering the use of the platform to clinics and hospitals that wish to use both our technology platform as well as our production capabilities,” said Iwinski.

3) The deployment of a voice-based technology that will offer clients an option to pre-process voice files of qualifying physicians to both speed turnaround time and improve quality.

MedQuist

A company spokesperson said, “As the world’s largest medical transcription service company, we see further structuring and assimilation of transcribed data into the electronic health record. We also see increased interest in adoption of automated speech recognition tools — as indicated by over half of the health care facilities that participated in a recent HIMSS Technology Adoption Survey. In addition, we see growing acceptance of international labor sources to meet U.S. transcription labor shortages and shrinking turnaround times.”

The spokesperson added, “We intend to further extend our substantial technology, service and process assets into a global supply system designed to provide the most efficient, secure and reliable transcription infrastructure available to health care facilities of all types.”

Among those assets :

  • Technologies and services that can be applied in both homogeneous and heterogeneous environments.
  • Security, reliability and value that can scale from small, rural community hospitals that utilize a domestic workforce, to large, distributed, urban health systems that have high transcription volumes and may wish to leverage a global workforce.

    “As the industry evolves, we believe that clinical documentation support technologies will continue to evolve from simple back-office or department-specific solutions to technology-enabled enterprise-wide solutions that fully incorporate caregivers into the process,” the spokesperson said. “Those solutions will have a more intense, measurable focus on quality and care delivery.”

    Axolotl

    “Axolotl will continue to expand its combined front-end and back-end MRN/ADT encounter matching, providing double assurance that data is associated with the correct patient in hospital EMRs and repositories,” said a company spokesperson.

    In addition, the company plans to release a new version of its transcription service for physicians that will accommodate new hand-held devices, e-signature, and personal templated letters and progress notes.

    Pilot projects using voice recognition and natural language processing will be deployed in early 2008, according to the Axolotl spokesperson.

    Philips Speech Recognition Systems

    According to a company spokesperson, Philips Speech Recognition Systems will “continue to drive the health care industry’s leap toward efficient medical documentation by providing industrial-grade speech recognition technology that turns spoken information into clinical data.” The spokesperson continued, “Voice-based data capture will be the basis for more efficient, accurate and safe delivery of health care.”

    The company said that it powers the largest health care speech recognition site in the world, where more than 50,000 U.S. physicians utilize speech recognition technology. In addition, major implementations of SpeechMagic have been reported from all over the globe: “Adoption rates among radiologists have reached levels between 50 and 80 percent in many European countries. Regional public health care sectors in Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark and the U.K. have implemented the technology on an unprecedented scale,” the spokesperson stated. “In Paris, all 12,000 physicians and 3,000 transcriptionists of the city’s public hospitals are set to switch to speech recognition by 2010.”

    The Philips spokesperson added, “This large-scale adoption of industrial-grade speech recognition is backed by intelligent features that increase the accuracy, reliability and extraction of clinical data. It holds the enormous potential to turn an administrative technology into a critical element of care.”

    Outsourcing Solutions, Inc. (OSi)

    “In our service-based industry, customer relations are at the forefront,” said an OSi spokesperson. “Therefore OSi’s focus is always on delivering a quality product and meeting or exceeding contracted turnaround time [TAT] with a competitive price and helpful staff. This year we want to build on our customer-centric approach by making technology and education our top priorities.”

    According to the spokesperson, OSi plans to use technology to create client-specific programs such as customer focus teams and dedicated e-mail accounts to make a significant impact on communication and troubleshooting. “Since the implementation process is crucial when a hospital outsources transcription, we will focus not on standard procedures carried over to each customer, but rather on tailoring our procedures based on what works best for each customer,” the spokesperson explained. “We also foresee speech recognition playing an important role in improving TAT with accounts.”

    The spokesperson stated that the company evolves and grows through its staff of medical transcriptionists (MTs), so another priority for the coming year is education. “The OSi Career Growth Program has received great recognition to date and will allow MTs to build their skills and strengthen their talents,” the spokesperson continued. “This gives our MTs a greater sense of pride in their work and an increased sense of loyalty to OSi, which is evident in the quality documents they produce for clients.”

    SPi

    “While technology seems to grab headlines, arguably the most important offering of any service company is the skill level and productivity of its workforce,” said an SPi spokesperson. “This ultimately translates into solid customer service and satisfaction.”

    According to SPi, the company’s focus over the next 12 months will be on the training and equipping of its workforce. Specifically, SPi plans the following initiatives:

  • Provide each one of the company’s medical language specialists with top-level, online tools that allow them to create customer reports. “These reports will ensure that our customers are able to meet all of their medical documentation needs,” the spokesperson stated.
  • Integrate the latest tools into the company’s platform and processes — from medical content resources to an integrated voice capture and speech recognition platform. “By doing this, our customers will be able to retain their cap-ex dollars, keep documentation costs under control and free up physician time,” the SPi spokesperson said.
  • Stay ahead of the technology curve with regard to data aggregation and outcome analytics. “This will ensure continued benefits in the area of CDA for our customers and career path enhancement for our workforce,” the spokesperson said.
  • Provide customers with an end-to-end solution that not only allows for the capture of content at the genesis of the record but also the ability to take advantage of the company’s coding and billing services.