środa, 31 lipca 2013

Why Professional Transcription Services Are Important

By Maryanne Goff


Professional transcription services come at a premium since it is hard to automate, and cannot be handled by an unskilled transcriptionist without the requisite training, experience and tools. It's the details that count, because a lot of the work calls for a high degree of accuracy. One mistake can prove catastrophic for a whole lot of people.

Maybe it would be better to start from the concept and work upwards towards today's real-world needs and implementation solutions. As per definition, the business of transcription involves taking speech in some form (live or recorded audio/video) and converting it into text that can be stored as digital data. This is done by a transcriptionist who listens to the audio and types it as text.

No doubt the first thought that comes to mind is that anybody could do this. True, but that doesn't guarantee accuracy and speed. This is where the professional part comes into the picture. There are hardware and software tools that can be used to improve on the quality and volume of the work done. The industry standard is that 15 minutes of audio should be transcribed in an hour.

There's also a fair bit of training and a learning curve involved. For instance, a medical transcription company needs to have transcriptionists with a sound knowledge about the field of medicine and the terminology. In fact, many transcription firms require candidates to have working experience as a nursing or pharmacy assistant.

Way it works is that doctors record the case details and other information they want to see in case files, and send over the audio to be transcribed. The job has to be done perfectly, because even a small error or omission can be fatal for patients and would inevitably end up as a medical malpractice claim. Such errors have been known to end the careers of the medical professionals involved.

Data security as it is shared with third-party providers and sent to and fro across the Internet is another major concern. Health care records in the U. S. Are subject to HIPAA compliance, and their providers with access to the data need to be complaint too. Similarly, compatibility with the hospital's electronic medical record system is needed, and this calls for the transcriptionist to follow specific naming protocols and standards.

A law firm will likewise need 100 percent accuracy in its transcriptions. Lawyers take depositions and have hours of recordings that must be transcribed word for word. Again, one mistake could result in a client losing the case in court, and this clerical error on the lawyer's part would be grounds enough for a malpractice claim.

Recorded speech transcriptions aside, there are many value-added professional transcription services that are in heavy demand. For instance, audio may be transcribed into text in several languages. Live video streams need closed captioning, and this is yet another area where no error will be tolerated since there is no verification process and it cannot be corrected. The bottom line here is that trying to get transcriptions done on the cheap often leads to be very expensive.




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