Here is some food for thought for people on the look out for better medical transcription services: ---

#1Does the transcription company have policies and procedures for ensuring the privacy of its clients' Protected Health Information (PHI)?
#2 Do the company’s policies regarding PHI include remedies for violations (i.e., disciplinary measures)?
#3 Has the company conducted a formal assessment of the sensitivity, vulnerability, and security of its programs and the client PHI it receives, manipulates, stores, reports and/or transmits?
#4 Are the transcription company’s employees subject to documented clearance policies and procedures regarding their access to client PHI?
#5 Does the transcription company maintain a record of access authorizations to client PHI?
More...

Some customers were trying to cut costs by considering installation of an EMR and reducing transcription. I saw a very interesting study in a blog by Robin Daigh as follows in his own words:Physicians use one of three methods for documenting care: dictation, structured data entry (keyboard, touch screen, mouse), or front-end speech recognition. In our experience and that of many EMR vendors, dictation is the preferred choice of 80% of doctors. Why dictation is the most efficient way to document patient care. Take the example of a typical outpatient visit to an internist. It takes about one minute to dictate a note for an established patient and about $4.30 in direct and indirect costs. By contrast, many EMRs use structured data entry as the primary method for entering clinical notes, in which physicians point and click their way through screens of drop down menus. Physicians find it takes 5 to 10 minutes on average to complete a note this way, meaning the indirect cost is anywhere from $13.50 to $27.00.

Yet many EMR vendors tout their products as a way to eliminate transcription. Indeed, physicians may “save” $1.60 in transcription expense, but at what cost for their valuable time? Physicians report working an extra 1 to 2 hours or seeing 2 to 3 fewer patients per day using direct data entry. In reality, work has just shifted from a lower cost resource to a practice’s most valuable resource, its physician. In our experience, this loss of productivity is the single biggest barrier to physician adoption of EMRs. By contrast, transcription customers are delighted to learn they can continue to dictate, have notes exported directly to their EMR, and preserve time for patient care. 

From Robin Daigh's blog md-it.com