The Medical Transcriptionist - Knowledge Based Workers Setting Clinical Data Free

Sitting in the Medical Transcription Industry Association Board meeting recently the group spent some time discussing the future of the industry and the changes we need to demonstrate the key value that our members and their organizations bring to the healthcare setting.

The Medical Transcription Industry is transforming and will become increasingly important to the successful implementation of electronic medical records to meet the burgeoning need for better more cost effective healthcare.

Clinical information is critical to the systems that are necessary to support our increasingly complex healthcare delivery. Clinical information comes from the patient via the clinician, the vast majority of whom are dictating that information for a medical transcriptionist to transcribe. Years ago this was done with tapes or even wax drums and type writers..... we have moved on from this paper based communication to digital information and sharing of data like every other part of society as detailed in a report The Digital Workplace and the Information Worker:

...the nurse who enters patients' vital signs into a patient-tracking system on a wireless PDA
...the pilot who uses a laptop to download flight manuals and who calculates flight plans based on weight and balance inputs

and in our personal lives as well.... I am sure many can relate to my experiences with my own 81 year old mother who is digitally connected despite distance and time to me and my family. I am grateful to receive regular e-mails and text messages and we both know what is going on in each others lives and schedule. This connection has morphed from traditional (snail) mail and letters, through telephone calls, faxes into full digital connectivity and near instantaneous updates.

Medical Transcription and the medical transcriptionist have moved on too and the transcriptionist, like everyone else, has become a knowledge based worker and increasingly applies technology to assist in producing accurate, timely clinical documents. And it is this production of documents that remains a barrier to the growth. 60% of the current inputs to the EMR are clinical documents that have been dictated and transcribed. It is hard given the length of time we have depended on documents and in particular paper to leave that paradigm behind but to grow into the value added profession that clinical documentation specialists/medical editor/medical transcriptionist needs to become, it is imperative to move away from two dimensional documents and start to think about clinical data that has been locked away in these documents and needs to be set free.

Those in the profession already know the extensive clinical knowledge stored by those in the industry. This was brought home to me some years ago when I discovered that a favorite past time amongst transcriptionist's was to guess the final diagnosis for the patient as they transcribed a dictation - before reaching that point in the dictation. That's a tremendous amount of clinical knowledge available to be applied and will make this transition to knowledge based worker a breeze!

And the technology is heading that way too - documents are so version 1.0. Structured encoded clinical data in semantically interoperable form is available today in the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture and the CDA4CDT format is available and implementable and brings the value of structured clinical data moving away from v1.0 documents to v2.0 clinical data container (I don't like this term either but I'd be interested in suggestions for another term that doesn't use "document" and captures the idea of data and knowledge)

We are all knowledge based workers. Knowledge and in particular clinical data is one of the key ingredients necessary to help automate clinical care and provide safer more cost effective care. Dictated documents contain clinical data and knowledge that is locked in a proprietary format that is human readable but not machine readable. Clinical documentation specialists/medical editor/medical transcriptionist provide the key to unlocking this data and placing that data into a CDA computer readable format.

Medical Transcription Knowledge Based Workers - Increasing Demand

A working from Home blog "Undress4Success - Work From Home" posted an interesting article on the Medical Transcription industry and the increased demand for Medical Transcriptionists

.... (Overseas) rates are going up too, particularly in India, because they’ve realized that they can demand higher prices thanks to growing need and scarce availability of experienced MTs

The author is right on target - Medical Editors are going to be in high demand. They are and will become key knowledge workers in healthcare. As Tom Harnish says in the blog

...qualified medical transcriptionists (MTs) are in short supply

Good news for those who fear the flatening of the world and the application of technology. Speech recogntion will improve the productivity by automating the rote task of converting the spoken word into text:

The (speech recognition) technology may increase costs by 15% to 20%, but it can increase output 100% to 200% according to one MTSO owner

But to add even more value to this process knowledge based workers will need to do more than just listen to the audio and convert this into text (either by pure typing or editing/proofing a draft output from a speech recognition engine). Adding clinical data that is machine readable and semantically interoperable between all the clinical systems being implemented in our healthcare system will become a must. That process is mostly manual and much information is lost in the avalanche of text based documents that contain the information but only in human readable form. Knowledge based workers will need to provide data elements and structure to these documents turning them into data that can be fed into clinical systems.

CDA4CDT provides an ideal common environment that is designed to flexibly cope with the varied levels of data encoding but still provide the healthcare system with the text based document that can be printed and used as it is currently. But the additional information incorporated into this file allows for semantic interoperability and data exchange at a level that EMRs want and need turning the huge volume of clinical text documents into clinical data inputs to the medical record that can be shared and exchanged between systems

Medical Editors can provide this manually by tagging documents and encoding using the CDA4CDT standard or by using speech understanding technology. Speech understadning outputs a document that is tagged and structured with clinical data. This merges the role of medical editor with a true knoweldge based fuctnion of reviewing and correcting clincal data embedded in the file and clinical document.

Medical Editors are knowledge based workers and are in short supply......