Medical Transcription Becomes Clinical Documentation

Neil already broke the news a few weeks ago that the MTIA (Medical Transcription Industry Association) changed its name to the CDIA (Clinical Documentation Industry Association). I was able to attend the press event that they held to officially announce the change.

I’m sure that many might not think this is such a big deal. Ok, the name change isn’t that big of a deal. However, I’d say that this part of the movement that I’ve been talking about for quite a while. Basically the survival of transcription for the forseeable future.

I don’t think I talked to any transcription companies at the event that weren’t working on some sort of EMR tied to transcription strategy (MD-IT, FutureNet, and MxSecure to just name a few). In many cases they’re doing their very own EMR offering.

I do think that the small transcription provider is likely in trouble. However, I won’t be surprised if transcription companies become successful EMR companies.

There’s still quite a few question marks with this strategy. For example, how well can a transcription company that’s use to working with people transition to making software?

The good thing is that these transcription companies already have relationships with a lot of doctors who want an EMR that somehow still uses transcription. I talked with one transcription company that offers an EMR and they had an interesting way of using transcription and voice recognition to transition them to EMR while helping them to learn to get use to doing the voice recognition. Very interesting approach.

Maybe transcription isn’t the long term solution. However, I wouldn’t count out the transcription companies just yet.

EMRandHIPAA.com’s HIMSS11 coverage is sponsored by Practice Fusion, provider of the free, web-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system used by over 70,000 healthcare providers in the US.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Really interesting topic. the only thing i just wanted to explain is , most the doctors involved in EMR integration or already moved to EMR are not a tech savvy. So definitely they will be in the need to EMR support.
    So that can be a medical transcription company . Also Mt companies are in taking their levels towards emr sw in the following ways:

    1. Making their own transcription platform
    2. transcription through online
    3. Supporting them by operating their EMR.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories