OUTSOURCING SUCCESS STORIES
A PSYCHIATRY CLINIC'S PREDICAMENT
A psychiatry clinic in Texas was having a very hard time documenting medical reports and records. Most of the reports were handwritten with the legibility of the reports such that even the physicians' own secretaries could not decipher them. Besides the wastage of time on handwritten reports and the expense of photocopying them for the patients and the referring physicians, the clinic was facing problems with delivering these reports on time.
The backlog of reports to be delivered was piling up and was reaching alarming proportions.
Auditing of the records was proving to be a huge problem. The clinic administration desired
streamlining and moving towards a paperless office to address HIPAA regulations and improve
operational efficiency. Also, the stakeholders (patients, referring physicians, government
agencies, and billing office) wanted to implement an electronic medical records system, and this
led them to reevaluate their existing operational processes.
Cost factor: Having the records transcribed locally by medical transcriptionists was an expensive affair as the average rate charged by American medical transcriptionists was about $15 an hour. Recruiting in-house transcription staff was a Herculean task as it involved a lot of formalities and overheads besides huge cost implications. It worked out to about 40 cents per line to get it transcribed using in-house staff.
OUR DIAGNOSIS
After contacting and reviewing many vendors, this clinic approached TranscriptionStar and requested our expertise to streamline their existing infrastructure. TranscriptionStar deputed two of its Outsourcing Consultants to do a comprehensive existing system analysis as follows:
- Time-to-chart metrics
- Critical analysis of the need for creating and maintaining electronic patient records
- Need for web-based document management system
- Cost benefit analysis of implementing electronic patient records
Our consultants identified many critical areas and their repercussions. Specifically, time-to-chart issues lead to cascading effects onto the entire chain of healthcare, patient care, provider accounts receivable management, thereby leading to poor business performance of the physicians' practice.
Psychiatry specific exclusive transcription team: Our consultants recommended that this job be done by an exclusive team of medical transcriptionists who were well versed with psychiatry and this job was entrusted to them.
