May 2006

 

Dear AAMT Member:

Since there is controversy surrounding the issue of offshoring medical transcription services, I want to let you know personally that I will be participating in an Indian government conference on business process outsourcing June 7-8, 2006, in Bangalore, India, to promote higher standards of practice and education that elevate the quality of the medical transcription profession. It is not the first overseas conference that AAMT has participated in, nor should it be the last. The AAMT Board of Directors believes there is a major concern looming over the U.S. healthcare delivery system – access to quality healthcare documentation and the need to hold all transcriptionists and service providers accountable to the highest level of documentation integrity, regardless of where the work is performed.

Medical transcription jobs have been going overseas, particularly to India, since the early 1990s. Although we do not want to see stateside MTs displaced, offshoring is just one of many trends used by the U.S. health system to build capacity and to rein in the cost of documentation services. If the profession ignores the market forces that are transforming the way its services are delivered – whether it is offshoring, enabling technologies such as speech recognition, structured formats, templates, or text – the profession’s influence on quality healthcare documentation will erode. Therefore, AAMT is deeply concerned that all individuals practicing and learning to become medical transcriptionists meet standards set by their professional colleagues, not by an outside government or business entity with limited knowledge of the profession. A true profession establishes and promulgates its own standards of practice and education because the profession knows its craft better than the lay public.

AAMT must be the champion for quality healthcare documentation and watchful of how trends in the industry affect the way you deliver your services. A crisis is brewing. It began with the grave shortage of qualified medical transcriptionists. The increasing volume of patient information and the escalation of healthcare regulation and litigation continue to fuel it. Now the crisis is being driven by the push toward implementation of an electronic health record. Without an adequate supply of qualified transcriptionists to document care, disruption of patient services can occur, hospitals can lose accreditation, and institutions will not be properly reimbursed for services rendered. The profession must work toward solutions to this problem or else others who know far less about your profession will come along and address the situation for you. Just read the literature from vendors promoting EHR/EMR platforms and speech recognition solutions by promising to ELIMINATE transcription costs.

What is AAMT doing to address this crisis?

In the past two years, AAMT has worked to:

A great deal more work needs to be done to ensure that quality healthcare documentation exists for your clients and that the profession expands its value so MTs continue to play a meaningful role in the future healthcare delivery system. We must advocate for the profession in a way that can realistically compete with all the other special healthcare interest groups wanting a piece of a shrinking resource pie.

If we focus on raising the quality bar of practice and education, listen to what consumers of healthcare documentation need, and figure out how to offer that service with integrity in a way that exceeds expectation, we will have continued relevance and greater worth to the healthcare system. It is important that AAMT creates more value for medical transcriptionists and the clients they serve. We hope you will actively join us in our crusade to ensure quality healthcare documentation and evolve the MT’s role in the production of that quality document.