AHDI Lounge

The Nuance study consisted of an online survey of forty physician practices with five or more full time physicians plus follow-up telephone interviews with six of them. Quoting from the survey's executive summary, "The objective of the study was to understand how practices handle paper within their practices, the challenges that arise in a paper-based or hybrid medical record system and their satisfaction with their current practices. The results of the study provide interesting insight not only into the progress the United States healthcare system has made in adopting electronic health records but also just how far it has to go before patient care documentation processes are predominantly electronic."

The study's authors concluded that "complete implementation of EHR systems by ambulatory physician practices with meaningful use of those tools and elimination of the vast majority of paper in these practices will take at a minimum of 10-15 years and potentially many years longer."

I believe this type of research has important implications for those of us within the medical transcription field. The demand for what I would call "traditional" healthcare documentation methods continues to be strong in spite of the hype surrounding the push for EMR implementation. Don't misunderstand me, big changes in the way we do what we do are coming, no doubt about that. But the sky is not falling, and the need for medical transcription as we know it today isn't going away any time soon. 

The real question in my mind is whether or not our profession has found the bottom of the compensation freefall. Unless the industry figures out a way to fairly compensate healthcare documentation professionals as knowledge workers instead of widget makers, it won't matter how strong the demand is because there'll be nobody left to do the work. 

Am I over-dramatizing? Yes...but not by much.

Jay Vance, CMT

AHDI Lounge Administrator/Moderator

Director, District 1

AHDI National Leadership Board

Jay Vance, CMT

AHDI Lounge Administrator/Moderator

Director, District 1

AHDI National Leadership Board

From my perspective, there are a number of trends in motion which will impact the medical transcription industry in the coming years, some positively and some negatively. On the downside, more and more hospitals with in-house transcription departments will look at outsourcing as a cost-cutting measure. There's no doubt in my mind that in-house MT positions will become much scarcer in the next few years due to outsourcing. At the same time, some of those MTs may decide to pursue other career opportunities within their institutions, perhaps in coding, abstracting, quality improvement, or EHR support roles. Speech recognition technology will continue to negatively impact the volume of traditional transcription, but again, the increased use of SRT will create an accompanying demand for more MT editors. Finally, I think it's safe to say that EMRs will generally decrease the demand for transcription, some more than others. For instance, our local hospital is implementing the Epic EMR, and their plan is to eliminate transcription altogether (we'll see how that works out). But not all EMR implementations are created equal in that respect; some customers include a dictation/transcription option in their workflow because the doctors demand it.

Overshadowing everything in this discussion is the fact that the demand for healthcare documentation is going to explode over the next 20 years as we Baby Boomers reach retirement age. I strongly believe that over the next couple of decades, even with EMRs, speech recognition, natural language processing and who knows what else, our healthcare delivery system is going to need plenty of skilled healthcare documentation professionals in a variety of roles. Yes, we will have to adapt to new technologies and new ways of doing things, but what else is new? Adapt is what MTs do, and I have no doubt we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Jay Vance, CMT

AHDI Lounge Administrator/Moderator

Director, District 1

AHDI National Leadership Board

Expect to see this trend continue across North America as CFOs and HIM directors realize that in-house transcription departments are significantly more expensive than outsourced transcription services.

Jay Vance, CMT

AHDI Lounge Administrator/Moderator