The way forward: How digitisation overcomes medical transcription challenges

FEATURE - Industry Innovation Article - iMedX

Critical to patient care, the Medical Transcription services facilitate the production and distribution of clinician dictation notes, emergency department notes and specialist clinic letters, enabling the general practitioners and other specialists to maintain quality of service.

Owing to the increased visitations, the ageing workforce and increased service costs, hospitals in New Zealand are facing challenges in managing the medical transcription services, which thereby negatively impacts the patient centred model. Understanding these problems can help in providing sustainable solutions for the hospitals and patients.

What are some of the key challenges and how can they be overcome? We have discussed two key challenges as follows:

1. Supply constraints coupled with increasing demand
The annual visitations have grown considerably due to the changing population demographics and changing healthcare needs. The supply side of the industry i.e., the access to qualified medical transcriptionists, has reduced substantially due to an ageing workforce and a limited training pool locally.

The iMedX approach focuses on narrowing this gap in the market forces of demand and supply. As part of our co-sourced transcription service, we provide the hospitals access to a large number of trained and experienced medical transcriptionists. The hospitals have the flexibility to distribute the workflow among the in-house typists and the iMedX typists to ensure scalability, timely documentation, and improved patient care.

2. Budget constraints coupled with high operating costs
On one hand, there is a need to do more with limited resources and on the other hand, the current clinical administration model is proving to be costly. Hospitals currently have limited resources i.e., the overburdened medical transcriptions and secretaries and old high-cost base transcription technologies. These factors make scaling of in-house operations difficult. In summary, the Hospitals require reduced costs, improved efficiency and reduced clinical risks. To achieve the desired outcomes, there is a need for a combined technology and workflow solution.

The iMedX co-source solution has been designed to help the hospitals in their journey of evolution of the documentation workflow process. This involves embracing technology, more specifically cloud solutions, to reduce the burden on the existing typists, improving the efficiency and enhancing the job satisfaction for the in-house typists. We work with you to clear up the backlog and streamline actions to avoid any bottlenecks in the future.

Both the in-house typists and the iMedX typists are set up on the same platform to share the workload. The platform integrates with the existing systems in the hospitals, increasing efficiency. The cloud platform limits the need for a large upfront investment.

The iMedX solution is in alignment with the New Zealand Health Strategy since it is aimed at improving turnaround times, patient centred care and increased opportunities for cost savings, all by using an integrated technology.

For more information on how to navigate the changing dynamics, enrol for the webinar hosted by HiNZ on October 26, 2022: Digital clinical documentation journeys.

If you would like to provide feedback on the above feature article please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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