There are many factors to consider when choosing a medical transcription company in Canada. Key factors include how experienced and capable the medical transcriptionists are who will be transcribing your audio to text, pricing (see “Medical Transcription Pricing Simplified” ) and turnaround time, commonly referred to in the medical transcription industry as TAT.
TAT matters for several reasons:
- Memory fades with time. The sooner you dictate and read a report, the more likely you will be to spot any inconsistencies in it.
- Good patient care. Provincial health insurance plans require that physicians’ document patient encounters and that specialists communicate with family physicians in a timely fashion. However, they don’t specify exactly how many days that should be. But the sooner the patient encounter or referral letter is documented, the more accurate and comprehensive it is likely to be. It can also impact on patient care.
- Insurance reports. Provinces have specific requirements for insurance medical claims. If a physician is seeing a patient to conduct an Independent Medical Examination on behalf of an insurance company, they only have so many days to return the transcribed document to the insurance company after the patient visit. Getting the medical report dictated and transcribed in a timely fashion meets these legal requirements.
- Legal implications. If you should be required to write a medicolegal report, you want the transcribed document returned promptly, so all the details are fresh in your mind when you review it and so it can be sent to the patient’s legal team in a timely fashion.
You might have a medical transcriptionist in your office, handling your transcription. If this person goes on holiday, maternity or personal leave, needs sick days, or is simply overwhelmed with too much work, it could take longer to get the necessary medical document transcribed. In the meantime, you’ll have seen a number of other patients, and you might not remember in detail the patients whose dictations you’re just getting to review now. That’s why outsourcing your medical transcription services to a professional medical transcription company means that there are multiple medical transcriptionists available to transcribe your audio to text, allowing for faster TAT. All issues related to sick days, vacation, leaves or even just a high volume of work are eliminated.
At 2Ascribe Medical Transcription, our goal is to offer our clients the best medical transcription service available in Canada. That’s why our aim is to return every transcribed document to our clients by the next business day. In other words, our turnaround time is to get you your transcribed document tomorrow. We also offer a priority service, where our goal is to meet a turnaround time of four hours for audio of less than 20 minutes in length. So when you are looking to outsource your transcription to a Canadian transcription company, make sure you ask about their turnaround time.
2Ascribe Inc. is a medical transcription services agency located in Toronto, Ontario Canada, providing medical transcription services to physicians, clinics and other healthcare providers across Canada. Our medical transcriptionists take pride in the quality of your transcribed documents. WEBscribe is our client interface portal for document management. 2Ascribe continues to implement and develop technology to assist and improve the transcription process for physicians and other healthcare providers, and recently introduced AUTOfax. AUTOfax works within WEBscribe to automatically send faxes to referring physicians when a document is signed off by the healthcare professional. As a service to our clients and the healthcare industry, 2Ascribe offers articles of interest to physicians and other healthcare professionals, medical transcriptionists and office staff, as well as of general interest. Additional articles may be found at http://www.2ascribe.com
