The 99% Deception Ploy

But It Sounded Good
Do you ever get letters from transcription services guaranteeing 99% accuracy in their transcription work; that’s impressive, don’t you think? That last sentence with spaces was 144 characters. When you accept “99% accuracy” you are saying I will accept 1.44 errors for every sentence of that length; again, that is every sentence in the whole document! Did you know that? Would you be happy with that? I would not.Don’t get me wrong, errors are inevitable, no matter who does the work. And we certainly don’t want to be unreasonable and nitpicking, but still you want to keep errors at a minimum. In fact, we want to do a whole lot better than 99%. How do you we, or you, do that?Now whether you are a medical transcription service producing the work or a medical practice receiving the work, here are a few ideas that might help:

• 1) Give the typist samples of the doctor’s work—lots of them. Many questions can be resolved by just studying a few good examples. In fact, this must be the single best method for minimizing errors in medical transcription—study that doctor’s past work. All this assumes that the person doing it in months past was a good and accurate medical transcriptionist. If the examples are of poor quality, they will be of limited help.
• 2) And as a follow up to point 1 above, make sure your typists are actually studying the samples, carefully. You don’t want to go to all the trouble of obtaining these examples just to be blown off by a typist that thinks their time is too valuable to reference example like this.
• 3) And as a second follow up to the above points, insist that each typist keeps an updated example notebook for every physician they do work for. Little steps like this will generate quality work which is what we all strive for.
• 4) When you (the medical practice or the transcription service) see errors, even if they are not a big enough problem to send the work back for a retype, do this: make a copy and mark boldly the errors and fax it back to the service or the typist. These illustrations will go a long way to eliminate even these small errors next time. And don’t forget, these notes should go in the typist’s notebook mentioned above.
• 5) And remember this, if the problems are big enough that a retype is justified, then don’t fail to ask that the work be done over—at no cost to you. But remember this, if you are unreasonably picky, you may lose a great medical transcriptionist. So, be reasonable.
• 6) If you have taken these steps but still say, “I’ve tried all this; the work is still bad, now what?” Simple, get another typist if you are a medical transcription service or another service provider if you are a medical practice. If they won’t work with you to improve the quality of their work, why work with them? Obviously they are simply not able to do quality work, or they do not care to make the effort.

Quality transcription is out there. You should make the effort to insure your medical transcription office produces it or your medical practice receives it.Now, what additional ideas do you have to insure quality medical transcription?