Medical Transcription Weekend Reading
I’ve spent this week in the great state of Maine, where it’s cold and snowy, and also a beautiful place to be. Since yesterday brought a wonderful Maine ice/snow storm, I’m spending a little time inside today and thought I’d take some time to share with you some of the things I’ve come across this week that I think MTs should be watching.
A New Name
In a press release this week. Medquist, who is perhaps the largest employer of medical transcriptionists, announced a name change to M-Modal. A few months back, these two companies merged and now have announced their decision to be known as M-Modal going forward. This is frankly a smart move on their part. With all that has happened in our industry in the last several years, that rebranding could be a real positive for the company. If you follow our industry, then you know there has been a lot of negative press connected to the Medquist name over the last several years. Rebranding just might help that.
A Look Into the Future
In an Advance article this week, the chief scientist, Juergen Fritsch, for M-Modal wrote about Collaborative Ingelligence in the EHR. If you don’t read anything else, take the time to read this article. It really does outline the push in the healthcare industry to use the technology to process things and increase efficiency. What is lacking in the article, in my opinion, is any mention of the need to have quality checks in place that assure the data that goes into the EHR is actually accurate.
Lest you think this is just one place talking about this, think again! There is an absolute push in the industry to have workflow that looks like this: Use speech recognition technology to process dictation, take that document and use natural language processing to assign data tags that then import directly into the electronic health record. Doing this would also be sure that the facility meets the meaningful use criteria established by the government. When faced with this conversation, I continue to say “but what happens when the SRT recognizes the wrong thing?” A great example of this was in the report on “Identifying Errors, Protecting Patients.” If you prescribe a gout medication for a patient with a diagnosis of depression simply because that is what was recognized, processed, entered into the system, which then generates order entries that ends up sending a prescription order to the pharmacy…well you get the picture. Your patient won’t have gout, but their depression sure won’t improve. The examples of potential for this are often dangerous to the patient. In a world where we should always have the patient as the North Star in health care, I hope that eventually we will start talking about how these technologies have to have some kind of check and balance in the systems we create so that patient safety doesn’t become an even worse problem than it is today.
ReBranding Counts
It’s just the kind of things above that make me a firm believer that we need a huge rebranding of our profession. I see so many things happening in the healthcare industry where our knowledge and skills are overlooked because we aren’t viewed as having “clinical” knowledge. We’re behind in taking that huge step and have some catching up to do. I hope we do it fast enough to make a difference.
How about you? What interesting things have you seen in our industry in the last week or so? I look forward to some good dialogue!
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Tagged with: electronic health record • future of medical transcription • writing your life story
Filed under: Challenges in Medical Transcription • Future of Medical Transcription
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Kathy, I had not seen that Medquist had taken on the name of its acquired company, M*Modal. That was actually a brilliant move on Medquist’s part, as the MQ name has some baggage while the M*Modal name is highly thought of.
This is quite relevant and timely to our profession’s own erstwhile rebranding efforts, isn’t it? I am so tired of hearing “medical transcription is dead” while watching doctors struggle with pointing and clicking at a computer when they should be paying attention to me. In the meantime, others, like scribes, are taking the opportunity to move into the workspace we occupy.
Let’s take a clue from MQ’s wisdom and pick a new name that better describes who we are and who we aspire to be as a profession. We are not dead, and neither is the need for us. But the name medical transcriptionist has too much baggage, even if it’s baggage piled on by lying EMR vendors.
To me, that’s clinical documentation specialists. I hope that AHDI’s board agrees so that we can move forward instead of staying enmired in the past.
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Kathy Reply:
February 3rd, 2012 at 2:43 pm
Susan you make a good point about scribes as well. They are now rebranding themselves to be “clinical documentation managers.” If we don’t claim something soon, there will soon be nothing left to claim.
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Nae Priest Reply:
February 6th, 2012 at 10:32 am
“To me, that’s clinical documentation specialists. I hope that AHDI’s board agrees so that we can move forward instead of staying enmired in the past.”
(Maybe I am going crazy being a new grandma and all that) … but why are we “hoping” the BOD approves that … I thought they already did a good while back?
Nae
[Reply]
Kathy Reply:
February 6th, 2012 at 10:35 am
You are correct that this was unanimously approved back in November. However, the board decided they needed to revisit the decision and are now reconsidering it at this week’s meeting. I hope we will have a resolution soon.
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Nae Priest Reply:
February 6th, 2012 at 10:46 am
Well that is certainly some speedy decision making.
I sure hope they are not gonna do a double-take with every decision they make these days or the mud-walking reputation is gonna get even slower … if there is something slower than walking in mud that I can think of
Nae
While Clinical Documentation Specialist would be appropriate for what we do, AHIMA has a position titled Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialist. In the past AHDI has worked with AHIMA when developing future roles so that there is no duplication. Clinical Documentation Specialist is too close to Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialist, and thus would not be a good one for us to use, in my opinion.
~Ava
[Reply]
Kathy Reply:
February 3rd, 2012 at 1:29 pm
I’m with Susan on this one. Ava, actually there is another organization that uses Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialist. I think it comes down to really getting a handle on the terminology that’s being used in health care these days. The word “clinical” means something. Sadly, the words “medical” and “healthcare” just aren’t where the industry is any longer. CDIA uses the wording clinical documentation, and in fact are working on rebranding their member organizations with the notion of producing clinical documentation. While I respect what AHIMA does, frankly I am a firm believer it’s time that we stand on our own as a profession and start standing up and speaking out for our members. If you look at the job descriptions for both of the above, it’s that word “improvement” that points to those roles being involved in coding and maximizing things for reimbursement. That isn’t the part we do. Articulating what a new title means will be no different than it has been for years to try to explain medical transcription. We just have to be willing to take bold steps.
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