Digital Marketing

Medical Transcription: The Dead Moose on the Table

Well, today I am going to ask you to continue with me in this discussion because I think it is one that we should start to have and one that I think we have avoided in our industry for a while. So have your coffee, take a deep breath, hold on to the end, and then I want to hear your thoughts.

First let me tell you a story. Several years ago, when I was on the (then) AAMT Board of Directors, our CEO told us a story about what we came to call “the dead moose on the table.” It was (paraphrased) like this: There is a large dead moose on the table. Everybody knows it is there. However, no one talks about it. And the more nobody talks about it, the more it sucks. However, we continue to ignore it, hoping that both the moose and the stench will go away. Today we could even take out the Fabreze and try to remove it like that. But in the end, there’s a dead moose, right there in the middle of the table, and unless someone finally speaks up, the stench is only going to get worse. I think we have a moose on the table.

Let’s look at some of the things that have happened over the last few weeks in our industry. First, we saw the announcement of the purchase of WebMedx, a medical transcription company, by Nuance, a very active technology provider in the EHR world. The next thing I noticed was that Medquist, a transcription company, bought M-Modal, a technology provider. This was followed by the announcement that Transcend, another transcription company, bought Salar, an EHR company. Along with that I saw a couple more things. In the Medquist press release, the new CEO discussed changing the company name and helping its clients with the change to EHR. At a HIMSS sponsored webinar, a Nuance representative discussed their plans to work with IBM Watson technology and also outlined the “vision” of how documentation would be done by running it through an SRT engine, using natural language processing, which also attaches data labels so that structured data can be immediately placed in the HCE. And no, the transcript was not mentioned at all in that talk.

Now let’s see what is happening to the people of our world. In the last two weeks, I have heard more stories than I can tell about the firing of good, seasoned and seasoned MTs. Why? Technology means that companies can do more with less. And yes, sometimes it is also because the company is outsourcing more of its work. I hear stories from MT who are small business owners that their workload is half what it was a year ago due to the electronic health record. Schools face the challenge of what to do to better prepare their students for sustainable future employment. How is everything that we teach now taught and yet new emerging technologies are still taught? Students in programs and new professionals in our industry are also wondering what the future will be like for them.

What we hear in professional associations related to medical transcription is the mantra of the narrative. Now let me first say that I believe that the narrative in a medical record has value. Tell the story of the patient. Both associations are focused on promoting the idea of ​​retaining the narrative as a way to “preserve” the profession and the industry, and perhaps even the organizations themselves. And yet, in the background, EHR is being rolled out as the healthcare industry keeps pace with complying with things like meaningful use and adoption of EHR that, unlike SRT technology does. 10 years is not just a nice improvement in productivity. but a mandate from the federal government. AHIMA has a working group that works on the roles of transcription and the HCE, and I imagine we will see a report when it is ready. Still, that’s the world of HIM deciding for us what we’ll be and where we might fit in. I really wish transcription associations were focused on the future and defining new roles.

So for the moose. This is what I think the moose is. EHR is a lot like the fever we all saw with speech recognition technologies. Some said it would never happen, some said “no in my life, I will retire first”, and some just waited for it to happen to them. Some learned the technology early on and that is probably the group that has done it best. However, remember that this technology was just a “good productivity enhancer” or “something so you can do the same job with fewer people.” It was not a government mandate. In 2016, from now on, healthcare providers will be penalized for not having an EHR and meeting these requirements. Penalized means less money. It will force the stragglers to finally get on board.

I think the moose on the table is that everything points to traditional transcription getting further and further away, perhaps until there is very little or nothing left. Okay, I said it. That means that if we only have those abilities that we’ve relied on for so many years, the future is going to be pretty scary. The EHR is here today, it’s not going away, and it’s critically important that we tackle the moose on the table and start figuring out how to make something of it. No amount of “Narrative-Scented Fabreze” will take care of this one.

This post is long. We are going to do a series of discussions this week about this moose and how we can approach it and be better prepared. I have watched our industry for a long time and many times MTs have simply let someone else decide their fate. I think it’s time to stop that and start doing something for ourselves. Without an honest and brutal dialogue, that will be difficult to achieve.

So let’s chat. I want to hear your reaction so far. This is not a one-day discussion, so let’s get started!

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