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Why Is Medical Transcription Better Than Automated Transcription?

Information may not be reliable

2/28/2021

Reliable medical transcription services transcribe the audio files into accurate patient records and then upload them into the EHR using HL7 interface.

Medical documentation is always an issue for healthcare units and clinics. With the implementation of EHR, it is believed that the role of medical transcription has been ruled out. But in reality, transcription is still an integral part of clinical documentation and workflow. With transcription and EHR, the physician’s dictation can be captured and converted into text format accurately while still keeping the transcription cost manageable. This blended approach of transcription and EHR helps deliver accurate and complete clinical documentation for patient care.

Today, with advanced technology like AI or speech recognition, healthcare organizations are now switching to automated transcription. But these advanced technologies cannot match the efficiency of the human transcriptionist. A research published in wired.com showed a comparison of accuracy rates between human transcriptionists and automatic speech recognition software. Human transcriptionists had an error rate of about 4% while commercially available ASR transcription software’s error rate was found to be 12%. This was because machines or newfound software are not capable enough to pick up the human language’s nuances, accents and tones. Following are 4 reasons why human transcription is better than automated transcription.

Clear understanding of dialects and accents: Professional transcriptionists are qualified and more experienced than machines and software and so they can capture any dialect or accent quickly. Transcriptionists can understand any dialect or accent and if they come across any unfamiliar ones, then they can search and come to the right conclusion. But a machine does not have the capability to comprehend different accents or dialects and it leads to mistranslated words or incorrect words that have no clarity or proper understanding.

Proper editing: Speech recognition technology is not capable of differentiating between semicolon, comma and other punctuations and it captures all words spoken, sounds and even fillers. It also transcribes incomplete sentences that lead to vague transcripts. But professional transcriptionists are skilled and experienced people who can understand each and every word or sound spoken. If they come across any unfamiliar words or sounds, they can rewind, listen carefully, understand the phrase and complete the sentences meaningfully. Skilled transcriptionists are also capable of filtering background noise and provide a clean transcript, unlike speech recognition technology that drafts inaccurate transcripts.

Better clarity with clear facts: Sometimes, while discussing a topic, the speaker may say something out of the topic without any substantiating evidence. Such statements can be researched thoroughly by human transcribers. They can check for facts and also missing pieces in a sentence and connect all the facts and sentences to make the transcript more sensible and understandable. However, with automated transcription software, all the facts cannot be verified or checked and machines may sometimes discard the recorded file and this leads to incomplete and misleading transcripts.

Understands the number of speakers and redundant content: If you have recordings of meetings or conferences, there will be multiple speakers and software may be unable to identify all the speakers. There may be an occurrence of phrases and sentences used several times, leading to redundant content. In such cases, transcripts can be confusing. On the other hand, human transcriptionists can play the recording a number of times and remove all unnecessary fillers and noise and transcribe only the main content and thus provides a well-documented transcript.

Good knowledge of healthcare industry: Good knowledge of healthcare related jargons and terminologies is essential to draft an error-free transcript. Automated transcription software would not be skilled enough to understand healthcare related terms and there are chances of wrongly interpreting the transcript. But a professional medical transcriptionist will be able to do justice to the transcription.

Accuracy with Medical Transcription

With EHR, many physicians find the checkbox or template method insufficient and inefficient to note down the patient’s health condition. In the case of EHR, physicians either enter the patient details directly into the EHR or dictate using microphone and then edit and enter the data into the EHR. The drawbacks of this process are:

Decline in physician productivity
Limitation of templates and checkboxes
Lack of quality checks and editing

The solution to this problem is the use of transcription while documenting EHR. With voice recognition integrated EHR, physicians can dictate and the physician’s notes are then sent to the transcription department for editing and later uploaded correctly into the EHR. Another alternative is to outsource, the physicians dictate and the audio files are outsourced to a medical transcription company. The skilled transcriptionists transcribe the audio files into patient narratives and then upload into the physician’s EHR using HL7 interface.