The market for clinical workflow solutions is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% through 2030, underscoring the undeniable need of healthcare providers for effective and optimized workflows. As patient loads and administrative demands continue to increase, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals need all the assistance they can get. One key solution for this issue is enlisting the help of medical transcription companies. Understanding how medical transcription can help with clinical workflow optimization is crucial. Accurate, high-quality, and reliable medical transcription can help optimize clinical workflow – with an emphasis on accuracy, quality, and reliability.
In this article, you’ll learn how:
- Medical transcription from reliable service providers significantly reduces physicians’ time on clinical documentation.
- Clients can integrate Ditto’s Medical transcription with EHR or EMR systems via HL7 interfaces.
- Outsourcing to Ditto means 99%+ accuracy.
What Are Clinical Workflows And Why Do They Matter in Healthcare?
Clinical workflows are the step-by-step processes that healthcare professionals follow to deliver patient care. That includes when a patient schedules an appointment to their diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. Naturally, these workflows will include documenting patient interactions, administering medications, coordinating with labs, and updating medical records.
Each medical facility or organization has its own ways to implement and optimize clinical workflows, and they’re not limited to considering only efficiency and productivity. Indeed, workflows must also cover regulatory requirements, system implementation, redundancy checks, error checking, and effective communication lines.
How Clinical Workflows Enhance Patient Safety And Care
Here’s how implementing and optimizing clinical workflows help improve efficiency for healthcare providers.
| Strategy to Enhance Safety and Care | Impact on Patient Outcomes |
| Implement standardized clinical workflows | Reduces errors and ensures consistency in patient treatment. |
| Use electronic health records (EHR) effectively | Improves access to complete, accurate data for patient care. |
| Employ real-time medical transcription | Helps healthcare facilities minimize documentation delays and ensures accurate records. |
| Conduct regular staff training and simulation drills | Enhances readiness and response to emergencies. |
| Leverage clinical decision support systems (CDSS) | Aids in diagnosis and reduces risk of medical errors. |
| Practice medication reconciliation at every visit | Prevents adverse drug interactions and dosage mistakes. |
| Establish clear communication protocols among care teams | Reduces misunderstandings and improves productivity and continuity of care. |
| Integrate patient feedback into care planning | Increases patient engagement and satisfaction. |
| Monitor infection control procedures consistently | Lowers rates of hospital-acquired infections. |
| Use checklists and protocols during surgeries and procedures | Standardizes critical steps and prevents omissions. |
What Is Medical Transcription?
Medical and clinical transcription is the process of converting audio and video recordings to text. Trained transcriptionists transcribe recordings into the required file format, which are then submitted to the clients and used for patient records, medical procedures, insurance claims, and legal documentation.
Accuracy and confidentiality are non-negotiable in medical transcription, as these transcripts often become part of a patient’s official medical history.
How a Medical Transcription Service Can Help Improve Clinical Workflows
Medical transcription might seem simple and look like another added cost, but the benefits you reap from the process are worth every penny. Here’s how it helps:
Reduce Clinical Documentation Time
A study conducted by Arndt et al. found that primary care physicians spend about 2 hours working on EHR tasks for every hour they spend with patients. This massive imbalance contributes to healthcare provider burnout, reducing overall patient care.
With transcripts that are EHR/EMR-ready, clinicians can take advantage of click-to-add features that automatically populate patient information and relevant data to the correct fields in their system. No more slaving away at the computer for hours. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals can now save time and focus more on improving patient outcomes.
Improves Accuracy
Manual entry is a big problem when it comes to patient data. Not only is it tedious, mind-numbing work, but it can also be a figurative form of torture to force healthcare providers to do all of it at the tail-end of a twelve-hour shift. In those situations, you’re practically asking for errors.
With transcription, you remove the burden of accuracy from the healthcare providers, allowing experienced transcriptionists to finish the job while maintaining precision throughout. Increased accuracy contributes significantly to high-quality patient care.
Boosts Compliance With HIPAA And Clinical Standards
Transcripts can also be used to standardize medical documentation and ensure compliance with relevant regulatory bodies like HIPAA and HITECH. Once the organization’s documentation process is set and properly communicated, your outsourced transcription partner can help maintain consistency across all records, streamline workflows, and reduce administrative burdens on healthcare providers.
Of course, those benefits are contingent upon your chosen transcription provider 1) having accurate results and 2) following your process to the letter.
Improves Coordination Among Care Teams
Communication among healthcare providers has evolved over the last few years with the use of technology, yet face-to-face communication remains important. This may present problems for a group of bone-tired nurses and physicians who still have to review charts and patient details with the relief staff.
Medical transcription helps by ensuring that every detail from patient encounters is clearly and consistently recorded, reducing the risk of miscommunication or incomplete information. This streamlined exchange of information extends to EHR/EMR integration, ensuring that medical providers across different locations get up-to-date information on their patients.
How Ditto’s Medical Transcription Can Help With Clinical Workflow Optimization
At Ditto Transcripts, we’ve perfected our process to provide hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities with the most accurate transcripts they can get – and here’s how we do it.
Highly-Trained, US-based Human Transcriptionists
AI transcription is cheap, sure, though only 86% accurate. Do you really want to save a few dollars and gamble on accuracy when your patients’ lives are on the line?
Work with us, and worry no more. Ditto only hires US-based transcriptionists to provide the highest quality and accuracy in medical transcription. Our experts have a full command of English and commendable experience in the medical field, and they’re all well-versed in every aspect of patient care.
Having been exposed to (American) English from day one, our professionals can work with various accents and dialects. They also undergo training and feedback/coaching sessions to stay on top of their game and get the latest changes in the medical field.
Furthermore, our transcriptionists know how to use context to get the right information, using surrounding information to pinpoint which words to use. Better yet, we can ask for clarification or mark ambiguous sections in the transcript for enhanced clarity.
Rigorous Quality Control
Some medical transcription companies might be okay with running an error check in Google Docs once and then handing in the transcript. That is an absolute nightmare for healthcare providers – instead of streamlining the process, you’ll have to comb through everything to get it right.
At Ditto, all transcripts undergo several proofreading and editing processes to ensure our trademark 99% (or even more!) accuracy. Our medical transcription services have been the go-to for many healthcare professionals across the US.
Customizability
At Ditto, you call the shots. Formatting and style guidelines can be provided to ensure that transcripts are ready to use the moment they arrive in your inbox, streamlining and improving patient care.
Feel free to provide us with templates for different medical departments or specialties, and we’ll make sure every transcript you receive is tailored to your needs and eliminates most of the common medical transcription errors in one easy process.
Do you need classic, no-nonsense standard formats? We also provide those to ensure that all information is captured and recorded correctly and consistently.
EHR/EMR Integration
What’s the point of having a transcript if you then need to read and manually input the data into your healthcare computer system?
With Ditto, your transcripts can be provided in RTF (Rich Text Format), which is easily integrated into EMR/EHR systems through HL7 interfaces with just a few clicks. That’s how you streamline workflows.
Our process significantly reduces documentation time, allowing you to focus on what matters most: your patients.
HIPAA and HITECH-compliant Security
We use the most up-to-date security measures to ensure that no line in medical transcription goes where it’s not supposed to. Our protocols include top-of-the-line encryption, redundant firewalls, on-site physical security measures, and non-disclosure agreements.
Even better, we are HIPAA and HITECH-compliant, so you can be sure that all your transcripts are secure and meet Meaningful Use requirements. Furthermore, healthcare organizations get these security features with all our service tiers—they’re not bundled off to a different service package under a higher-priced model.
Speed And Accuracy (Without Sacrificing Either)
Yes, accuracy is non-negotiable. That doesn’t mean we get to sit on your transcripts for months to make them usable. Ditto offers STAT file deliveries in four hours or less.
Dr. Steven B, neurosurgeon and Ditto client, says it best:
“Getting in contact with the account manager in the hospital would take hours and sometimes days. I never had a problem getting in contact with Ditto. They understood how time-sensitive and crucial my dictations are.”
Ditto Is Your Best Choice For Medical Transcription
Optimize your workflow and never worry about errors again. Don’t settle for shoddy transcription service providers or automated solutions that make you want to ask for a refund, even if they’re free. Work with us and experience industry-leading service at affordable rates.
Not convinced? Call us with any questions, or take advantage of our free trial to experience what it’s like working with the best.
Ditto Transcripts is a HIPAA-compliant medical transcription company based in Denver, Colorado, that provides fast, accurate, and affordable transcription services for hospitals, clinics, facilities, and practices of all sizes. Call (720) 287-3710 today for a free quote and ask about our five-day free trial.