I recently got an email about a new consortium of medical transcription service organizations (MTSOs), called the Medical Transcription Service Consortium. The basic concept is that these organizations will provide the tools for doctors who use their service to share patient information. The new framework they’re working to create will support structured narrative notes which read like a text document, but include XML tags that allow for granular patient data to be imported into an EMR.

I like the concept and I’m intrigued by the involvement of transcription companies in the sharing of data. They already are sharing the data between the transcription company and the doctor’s office. Seems like a reasonable suggestion to be able to share it with other doctors offices. I’m told that it’s still very early for this consortium. It will be interesting to see it evolve over time.

The consortium members include: ICSA Labs, an independent division of Verizon Business, the MTIA, MD-IT, MedQuist, MxSecure, Sten-Tel, and Webmedx. The press release from MD-IT says these organizations represent 2,500 hospitals and 375,000 physicians nationwide. That’s an estimated 200 million narrative patient notes created annually and 2.5 billion patient records in electronic archive. I’ll just say, that’s a lot of patient data that could be easily shared.