According to the American Transcription Association President Regan recognized the value and importance of medical transcriptionists and thus established National Medical Transcriptionist Week on May 21, 1985. President Regan realized how common it was becoming for people to have more than one physician, change physicians, go to a specialty physician, etc. Consequently, he understood the significance of proper, legible medical transcription so that a person’s medical history could be provided to and reviewed by multiple physicians, if need be, for proper treatment and patient care.

Well, things have changed significantly since 1985 and in this world of Electronic Health Records what is the future of the Medical Transcription Industry and the tens of thousands of medical transcriptionists working in the United States?

Obviously the market for Medical Transcription services is in decline and the number of businesses providing MT services is shrinking dramatically.  Smaller firms are being acquired by larger firms, or simply going out of business.    Larger firms are finding new ways of generating revenue offering services that go well beyond those offered just a few years ago.

The medical transcription industry is not going away, at least in the near term, but it is changing and changing quickly.  If you’re an MT what are your thoughts on the future?  What are you doing to retain customers, add services and keep the revenue flowing?  Let’s talk about it either in the comments section below or here on Google Plus.

Transcription, once the primary means of documenting patient visits, now has competition from other documentation methods such as front-end speech recognition and point-and-click tools within the electronic health record, or EHR. The result is that the transcription industry – estimated at $10 billion annually in 2008 – has been in steady decline. WebChartMD’s series of webinars focus on the changes that have occurred and the ways transcription companies can reposition themselves in the clinical documentation market.

“The webinar looks first at the impact EHRs are having on different segments of the transcription industry,” Christensen added, “and then breaks out five key areas medical transcription companies need to focus on in order to survive the transcription downturn.”

The five areas presented in the initial webinar and then featured in upcoming break-out sessions are “Changing Marketing Tactics”, “Changing Sales Tactics”, “Interfacing Boot Camp”, “Leveraging Technology Effectively”, and “Back-End Speech Recognition.” All webinars are offered at no cost, and are accessed using GoToWebinar, an easy-to-use web-based webinar tool.

The first webinar, “Surviving the Transcription Market Downturn”, will be held May 23rd and repeated on May 25th. For a full schedule of webinars and to register, please visit www.webchartmd.com/webinars

The companies claim the combination of Nuance and Transcend will significantly improve the way patient data is captured, processed and used across the small- to mid-size hospital market, which comprises approximately 90 percent of hospitals in the U.S. Nuance will build upon Transcend’s market standing among this group of hospitals, expanding its customer base through the delivery of voice-enabled and Clinical Language Understanding-powered solutions that help healthcare organizations of all sizes achieve Meaningful Use and accelerate the transition to ICD-10.

“Our providers love it,” commented Pam Gehrig, Director, Health Information Management at Pacific Medical Centers.  ”With partial dictation, our providers can dictate the more ‘context rich’ sections of the patient visit within the Epic encounter, and those transcribed sections are embedded in the note along with all the other patient visit information entered directly into the EHR.  The result is we’re saving on our transcription expenses while improving the quality of our patient care.  Everybody wins.”

Partial dictation works by allowing healthcare providers to dictate specific sections of the patient encounter, which are then routed to a transcription resource and transcribed.  The completed transcription is automatically routed back to the EHR via an encrypted interface and into appropriate sections of the patient note.

“Partial dictation is the perfect marriage of a physician’s need for efficiency and a healthcare corporation’s need for effective patient management systems,” says WebChartMD’s CTO, Andrew Jebasingh.  ”We see a growing demand among physicians to have the option of dictating certain sections of their patient encounters, and using Epic, along with partial dictation, can help physicians reduce the time it takes to document a patient encounter via their EHR by up to 50%.  And when you’re seeing twenty or more patients a day, that adds up to a lot of time saved each day.”

NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, Inc. has announced a reseller agreement with Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading provider of speech-driven clinical documentation, clinical language understanding and analytics solutions to more than 450,000 physicians and 10,000 healthcare institutions worldwide.

Under the agreement, NextGen Healthcare will resell Nuance’s Dragon Medical speech recognition software to its NextGen® Ambulatory EHR clients, enabling physicians and administrators to navigate, dictate and correct medical documents by voice, directly within the electronic health record (EHR). Dragon Medical software is currently used by more than 180,000 clinicians worldwide. By incorporating the software as part of the NextGen Ambulatory EHR workflow, healthcare organizations can:

– Improve physicians’ clinical documentation productivity;

– Minimize time and costs associated medical transcription;

– Drive appropriate levels of reimbursement through more complete documentation;

– Increase patient engagement by enabling providers to capture data at a discrete level; and,

– Enhance the quality of clinical notes to facilitate better care coordination.

“Dragon Medical provides physicians and their staff the freedom to incorporate high-value, customized narratives as part of patients’ medical records,” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Healthcare. “Together, advanced voice and language understanding solutions make it possible to capture the complete patient story and enable unprecedented access and interaction with the data that has been captured. We believe this collaboration with EHR leader NextGen Healthcare will bring far-reaching benefits to its diverse client base.”

“With healthcare reform initiatives such as Meaningful Use and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) continually emerging and evolving, the ability to collect patient data in a discrete manner is perhaps now more important than ever,” noted Scott Decker, president of NextGen Healthcare. “The comprehensive reporting capabilities offered by NextGen Ambulatory EHR are best utilized when discrete data is not only accessible but also stored in the proper format. Leveraging Nuance technology will provide our clients the flexibility needed to capture patient data and effectively populate it through our powerful reporting engine. We believe that Dragon Medical will complement and enhance the breadth and depth of our EHR capability.”

Image via CrunchBase

Nuance Communications, Inc. and Transcend Services, Inc. have announced a definitive agreement for Nuance to acquire Transcend, a  provider of medical transcription and speech editing services, for approximately $300 million, net, in cash.

With Transcend, Nuance will accelerate access to and expand its customer base within the small- to mid-size hospital market, which comprises approximately 90 percent of hospitals in the U.S. and increasingly demands cost effective, voice-enabled, clinical documentation solutions to achieve Meaningful Use and the transition to ICD-10. With Nuance’s voice-enabled and Clinical Language Understanding technologies and deep electronic health record (EHR) integration, combined with Transcend’s high-quality transcription and editing services, hospitals can make clinical documentation and workflow more productive and cost efficient and extract greater value from clinical information.

“The acquisition of Transcend will expand the delivery of our innovative voice and Clinical Language Understanding solutions especially to small- and mid-size hospitals,” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance’s Healthcare business. “With Transcend, we will drive change and improvement to the way these hospitals capture and leverage clinical information. The acquisition is a natural extension of Nuance’s existing healthcare business, and will strengthen our solution and services portfolio, as well as enhance our profitability.”

Among the benefits of Medics FlowText is its simplicity and intuitiveness, which now easily automates a function that has been a persistent issue with EHRs: getting transcribed text into the appropriate data fields within the patient’s electronic record without having to perform any additional steps.

David Barzillai, President of ADS, said, “Medics FlowText represents that next level of workflow and data entry automation. It is a very intelligent capability in every sense. It eliminates the need to re-enter data that has already been transcribed, allowing the physician to move that much more quickly through his or her daily workflow using the MedicsDocAssistant EHR.”

Rick Lobel, President of Datel Solutions, said, “We have been providing Dragon Medical speech recognition integration to medical practices and EHR developers for many years, and we can say that Medics FlowText is a breakthrough capability. Only a highly robust system can accommodate Medics FlowText functionality, and with the MedicsDocAssistant EHR, we were fortunate to have had exactly that type of system with which to work.”

Medics FlowText enhances even more dramatically all of the other times aving features built into the MedicsDocAssistant EHR.

Contact ADS for more information on Medics FlowText, MedicsDocAssistant EHR, the MedicsPremier system for comprehensive practice management automation, and the MedicsRIS for radiology.

BayScribe has announced the successful deployment of the BayScribe Clinical Documentation System (CDS) with SOAP Transcription in Wayland, MI to service Hospitals and clinics with superior clinical documentation tools, including creating Structured Data for Meaningful Use.

SOAP Transcription is a leading U.S. medical transcription services provider and BayScribe, the industry’s first comprehensive Clinical Documentation Solution that includes generating Structured Data. Through the partnership, SOAP customers receive state-of-the-art dictation technology, more flexible physician documentation capture options and an easy migration path to EHR-based template reporting. Furthermore, by implementing the BayScribe platform SOAP customers reduce system costs and virtually eliminate the need for technology support for dictation devices. The announcement was made by Mary Ann LeBoeuf, Vice President of SOAP.

“We are committed to finding and deploying technology tools that make it easier for our customers to support their physicians while also moving forward into EHR environments,” mentions LeBoeuf. The BayScribe platform offers mobility, efficiency and a practical bridge to EHR adoption including the ability for physicians to dictate on mobile devices and utilize digital ink pens at the point-of-care. Physician feedback regarding the use of iPhones in conjunction with the BayScribe platform has been outstanding.

“Physicians don’t transition from dictating and writing everything for decades to typing, pointing and clicking in the EHR, as evidenced by the EHR adoption rates,” mentions Steven Bonney, Vice President of Business Development & Strategy for BayScribe. Instead, moving physicians into template-based documentation should be a slow, well-planned migration process focused on the physician’s experience and natural workflow.

SOAP agrees and works closely with clients to eliminate EHR adoption obstacles and enable physician documentation practices to include traditional dictation and transcription and handwriting without sacrificing the Structured Data required for Meaningful Use and Collaborative Care.

The Company will celebrate the launch of M*Modal with the Opening Bell ceremony at the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York City’s Times Square at 9:30 a.m. ET today.

“Aligning our technology and services is a natural evolution of our stated Company direction as we work to deliver solutions that help hospitals, physicians and other providers improve care while addressing many of the significant challenges facing healthcare today,” said Vern Davenport, Chairman and CEO of M*Modal. “Our deep experience in medical transcription, coding and clinical documentation workflow combined with industry-leading innovative technology and a focus on the healthcare market provides us with a strong platform to grow our core business, expand to underpenetrated markets and increase our partners within the healthcare ecosystem while investing in new technology offerings.”

In August 2011, MedQuist Holdings, the nation’s largest provider of medical transcription and a leader in technology-enabled clinical documentation workflow, merged with M*Modal, a leader in advanced Speech and Natural Language Understanding technology. “The decision to consolidate global operations under the M*Modal name illustrates our progression from a services-focused business to a provider of technology-enabled services and commercialized proprietary technology solutions,” Davenport added.

The move also supports the Company’s plans to expand the core transcription business, open new markets, significantly increase the sales force and development resources, as well as leverage its significant intellectual property portfolio.

M*Modal clients now have access to end-to-end clinical documentation solutions that help caregivers capture the patient’s complete clinical story and extract meaningful information used to populate electronic health records (EHRs) and automate the data used to feed business processes such as coding, billing and revenue cycle management.

“In the past, much of the patient’s story was locked in the transcription text. Opportunities to share information were missed because there was no connection between the text and other data systems,” said Davenport. “Today, our tools aren’t just converting voice to text – they’re analyzing that text and identifying critical information that provides a higher degree of insight and richer context for improved clinical and financial decision making.”

“M*Modal has worked with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center supporting patient care through a blend of technology and services. We look forward to the services this integration makes possible,” says Lynn Vogel, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The Company’s technology-enabled services include cloud-based Speech Understanding technology that allows physicians to capture the patient’s story anywhere, anytime using any electronic device, as well as Natural Language Understanding technology that instantly converts the narrative into structured clinical documents that can be shared and integrated with existing workflows or EHRs. Additional M*Modal tools – such as Computer-Assisted Coding for ICD-10 migration – automate business practices, enhance reporting capabilities and enable comprehensive analysis that increases productivity and optimizes revenue.

“KLAS is excited to track the progress of client success for the new M*Modal,” said Adam Gale, President of KLAS. “The combination of new, energizing technology and a forward-thinking leadership team should bring positive results for providers across the country. Both service delivery and innovation are elements derived from vendor organizational strength, and the ability to execute changes at the leadership level are evidentiary of that vendor’s desire to provide the utmost of quality to customers. Already we see excitement from providers who are buying into the vision.”

By focusing on three main areas: engagement (capturing the patient’s story); collaboration (sharing that story with care teams and integrating it with existing business processes like coding); and intelligence (extracting meaningful data that satisfies reporting requirements and enables better clinical and financial decisions), M*Modal’s solutions accelerate EHR adoption, enhance regulatory compliance, and provide deeper insight that supports the introduction of new care delivery models.

Currently, the Company provides technologies and services to 2,400 hospitals and clinics – including some of the nation’s leading healthcare institutions, 850 physician practices, and 165,000 physicians, as well as leading EHR providers and medical transcription organizations.

“By leveraging natural, context-based speech-to-text, the Better Day™ platform provides a better, more complete way for providers to document patient encounters, which in turn takes computers out from in between patients and providers, ultimately improving the relationships providers have with their patients,” said VoiceHIT CEO Peter Ragusa, MD, MPH. “The Nuance Healthcare Development Platform offers unique innovations that empower Better Day™ users to speak naturally during encounters while the information necessary for robust documentation is collected in the background, increasing provider productivity while enhancing the quality of the clinical experience for both patients and providers.”

The Better Day EHR platform enables healthcare providers to passively and unobtrusively collect clinical information at the point of care, significantly reducing manual data entry, typed or transcribed, by up to 75 percent. In doing so, the Better Day™ EHR platform gives providers more time with patients to deliver higher-quality care.

According to the company the Better Day EHR Platform will initially be targeted to small and mid-sized ambulatory clinics and the platform will accommodate all specialties.  As the company grows they plan on expanding into larger clinics, hospital systems and healthcare organizations.

Users of the Better Day EHR platform will reap the productivity and financial benefits of a secure, industry-leading medical speech recognition technology in order to automate clinical documentation – further improving operating efficiencies and raising the quality of patient care while reducing overall costs. The medical transcription, billing and coding industries represent an approximately $14.2 billion annual market.

The Better Day™ EHR’s platform and application suite is planned for beta release in early 2012 with a general release scheduled for Q3 of 2012.