Technology can enable better decision-making and also can create organizational efficiencies. Transcription technology offers many advantages today with regards to meaningful data collection. Everything is digitally managed, which provides the potential of a record of virtually every action required in the whole process of dictation and transcription. A good platform enables data collection and report creation that will help in operational decision making processes. A well-designed platform will provide a variety of report templates and real time analytics to help measure productivity and activity.

In sum, one can’t manage what one can’t measure. The first steps toward improving your organization’s performance are collecting data and creating benchmarks for performance, which will show where inefficiencies are hidden. Making significant and positive changes in an organization’s performance is usually realized by a good dictation and transcription platform.

Transcription could be considered the crossroads of two famous management principles: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and “figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.”

The metrics used to gauge performance against “industry standard” cost and quality benchmarks vary substantially. For cost measurements, Medical Transcription Industry Association [MTIA] and the American Health Information Management Association [AHIMA] recommend the visual black character [VBC] counting method as the most precise and easily replicated volume calculation across platforms, as counts can be validated with Microsoft Word. When comparing and contrasting vendors, it is important to define all costs not associated with volume, such as interface fees, start-up costs, etc., as part of your overall expenses. If these expenses are not considered, what appear to be low line or character rates can quickly escalate to higher overall costs.

Spaces, carriage returns, and hidden formatting instructions such as bolding, underlining, text boxes, printer configurations, and spell checking are not counted in the total character count, according to AHIMA.

Standard Unit of Measure Saves Money

From a cost perspective, VBC provides a standard pricing model to receive competitive bids and gives HIM departments more ability to audit and verify costs. Organizations are encouraged to ask for pricing based on the VBC standard, look and compare existing reports and finally, ask what is included in the quote. Items such as technology, implementation, training and other services may vary from vendor to vendor.

Having a standard unit of measure has enabled the medical transcription industry to address some significant issues it faces along with healthcare as a whole, including responding to the call for the structured use of data, IT standards, and increased competition. Transcription faces increased competition since it is now a global industry.

The adoption and universal application of VBC as a standard measure benefits the entire transcription industry because it supports healthcare information management (HIM) departments in establishing and maintaining service level agreements; encourages better business relationships between healthcare organizations and medical transcription service organizations; and it provides improved tools for evaluating and selecting transcription service providers.

Although a common volume measurement scale in itself does not save money, it can improve your ability to gauge the financial impact of any change. By converting the cost of any transcription-related process to a common cost-per-line scale, you can accurately predict the true financial impact to the collective budget.

Quality measurements

Although AHDI (formerly AAMT) has very clear definitions of what constitutes the different error types and their respective error values, calculating a quality score for a practitioner, vendor or department can be much more subjective. 

The definition of how sample sets will be collected, how many documents will be evaluated, and the target quality score expectations in contracts and/or employment agreements is critically important. No one wins if one has to hunt for documents with errors or without errors, and then present them as representative of the whole body of work. Quality scores do not represent accuracy percentages.  An acute care report, which averages 55 lines, with errors that total two points, for a score of 98, cannot be considered the same accuracy percentage as a radiology report, which averages 10 lines, with the same deductions. 

Evaluating metrics

Every technology or service vendor has various options as to how to calculate and manage these metrics, and needs to do so, in order to meet their clients’ varying contract requirements. Buyers need to evaluate all potential vendors against a single methodology that they (buyers) are able to substantiate against their own controlled standard, i.e., volume calculations within Microsoft Word. To ensure consistency, quarterly random spot audits should be conducted against the control standard.