Evil Menacing Replacements?

Electronic Medical Records is not something that will be in our future someday, it is very much present now. It’s all around us. Is it a good idea? To the home-based medical transcription industry, that is like asking horse and buggy makers what they think of that new gadget the automobile. You’re not likely to get a helpful answer. But emotion aside, for the physician there are several things need to be considered.

1) How imperative is it to experiment with these new technologies right now? Let’s face it; they will get better and cheaper over time. Not a few medical practices have put small fortunes into EMR’s only to get rid of them later. They simply were not happy with the results.

2) Are you satisfied with traditional methods right now? Generally this means you dictate into a phone or a digital recorder and forget about it. That’s not bad. Many physicians are very happy with this method.

3) How valuable is your time? For instance, getting Voice Recognition programs to work can be like wrestling with a pig, you just get dirty and the pig loves it! (Now that didn’t make perfect sense but I’ve been looking for some place to use that illustration which I think is really cool.) But you get this idea; it can be frustrating and even incite the spilling forth of bad language.

4) Point and Click database software gives you limited options with canned paragraphs that aren’t always helpfully descriptive.

5) The cost of traditional medical transcription is an economic bargain. In 1982 we started our first medical transcription business; we charged 10 cents a line. Now, 28 years later, we charge 10.75 cents a line. How does that rate of inflation compare with the other products, services and salaries that you pay for today? It is truly a deal!

6) And remember this: MS Word documents are Electronic Medical Records. They can be imported into most any EMR program you are currently using.

7) Then there is the editing role of the medical transcriptionists. This is especially useful for those doing ERM’s which often fail at this point.

Now, having said all this, what is the future of medical transcription? Will EMR’s replace it? Or will EMS’s open a new arena of cooperation between the physician and traditional medical transcription? One other point of importance is compliance. Is the US government requiring physicians to provide an electronic product that will make it easier to move the record between various medical offices?

Here is an important question for the medical transcription companies: what has been your experience in recent years? Do you keep clients that have moved to EMR’s, or are they "letting you go"? Has your work increased in recent months, or is it decreasing in the face of this type of competition?

Our own experience is that our clients that have adopted EMR’s eventually stop using our service. We have not been successful in convincing them to use us in some type of auxiliary role. They tell us that they are saving money with this new technology over our low rate.

So, we are worried; are you?