The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting piece on the practice of hospitals and other health care providers sending medical charts out to be read and typed into computers. Many medical transcriptionists in the US work in their homes doing the work. But an increasing number of medical records are being sent to India to be entered into computer format.
Last month, for example, India celebrated World Medical Transcription Week. "India has become the favorite country for outsourcing in the U.S.," Prasenjit Ganguly, vice president of the country's largest medical transcription service,
This passing around of hard copy medical records into homes and even to other countries certainly does not inspire confidence that medical privacy is being well protected. While the advance of electronic communications makes it easier to send records abroad to be translated in the longer run technology will probably eventually eliminate the need for human medical transcriptionists entirely. Scanning software ought to eventually be able to read many paper charts. Also, voice translation software ought to be able to transcribe video records made by doctors. But eventually all data entry on medical charts will be done directly into encoded digital form. Even voice records should be translated into properly spelled words just as doctors speak into a recording device.
Advanced integration of test equipment and lab results with medical computer databases should entirely eliminate the paper copies of test results. Increasing portions of medical records will never even be generated as hard copy in the first place.
So my FuturePundit forecast on medical record privacy is in the short term even greater distribution of written medical records to distant countries for data entry. But in the longer term all human medical transcriptionist work will be entirely eliminated.
Will the end of hard copy medical records increase medical privacy? Or will medical records be sent between health care providers, insurers, and other organizations more rapidly and in larger quantities? Will increasing numbers of workers of those organizations will be able to more quickly and easily look up details of your medical history? Will the result be that so many medical records are accessible by any one person that a black market in medical record information will become easier to develop since a single worker in a hospital chain or insurance company will be able to sell the records of many people to interested parties?
By Randall Parker at 2003 June 09 01:18 AM Surveillance SocietyI'm so glad I don't have anything in my medical records that I care in the slightest about. So other people find out I had a broken arm? Like that is going to concern me? They could always have looked at me to see the plaster cast.
You are SO wrong about medical transcriptionists being replaced. Never really sat down and LISTENED to a doctor mumble, stutter, chew, mispronounce, and laugh with the nurses his way through a medical report, have you? The voice-to-text does verbatim transcription. And believe me, no doctor, no hospital wants that in the medicolegal document. MTs don't just type, they "clean up" a dictation. We proof for good grammar, create it where it never existed in the first place. We will take "melanotic stool" dictated and voila it is transcribed melenic stool like it should have been dictated in the first place.
Y'all just DON'T know. :)
Dear Kathy:
Thanks for you interesting comments. I am an MT in India saying "irritated bowel syndrome". Had me stuck for a while.
Keep writing.
Ganesh.
Would it be possible for you send to me the names and e mail addresses of firms doing medical transcripts around Ahmedabad and Baroda.
Dr Pradeep Ganatra
Would like to know names and e mail addresses of firms doing medical transcripts in chennai, Pondicherry, Tiruvannamalai areas as soon as possible.
Can I be any assistance w/ that? We have a firm in pakistan doing just that. If you are interested in getting your MT done at a cheaper rate, please e-mail me at zmohamma@hotmail.com.
Thx
I totally agree with Kathy. I am an MT too, and there are WAY to many things that sound a alike like cirrhosis and psoriasis. How is a computer going to know that one involves the liver so it would not make sense for a dermatologist to be dictating about it? MTs will ALWAYS be needed!
Hi, I would like to know the institutes which offer MT courses near Mumbai, Thane or Dombivali.
I am from the Philippines and right now I am studying to be an MT. Here we are trained not to be empty MTs. I agree with Kathy, we don't just type, we are also trained to think.
Hi I wanted to do Medical Transcription course.Let me know about such in Dombivli or Thane.Tell me also about scope in future.
You are so wrong about us MTs being replaced, whether we are in India, Pakistan, some island in the South Pacific, we are necessary and will always be necessary. You have never heard the crap that comes out of the voice recognition software, the best in the business mind you. Never, never, never!!! You need a human with common sense, something that you will never duplicat in digital form to make sure these legal medical records are accurate. It's a small world and MTs can be in any part of our world with our common sense and able to turn gibberish into a medical legal document ready to go to court if need be and support that physician's decision and actions which to a physician I suspect is foremost in his life when he gets in this position to back up his medical decision making, tell me then that he is so hot for this so called 'progress' in medical transcription or he was glad that there was a human being eyeballing the dictation and making sure it was accurate or sending it back to him if he had misspoken as doctors are only human. How does the voice recognition pick up on that???? I am thinking of a doctor's career, not just the easy way out and oh, what progress we have made into the Jetson era : )