PRN Funding recently had the opportunity to connect with many MTSOs and medical transcriptionists when we exhibited at the 20th Annual MTIA Conference in Louisville, KY a couple of weeks ago.

Account Manager, Joanna Schafer, represented PRN Funding in booth #26, and she had the opportunity to speak with a number of MTSOs about the benefits of PRN Funding’s medical transcription funding program.

In a recap email, MTIA listed a slew of key issues and priorities discussed at this year’s conference as well, namely:

1. The 2009 MTIA Conference had 80 first-time attendees.
2. MTIA membership grew by 10%.
3. Attendees wholeheartedly supported a uniform visibility campaign comprised of advocacy to key health policymakers and a public relations strategy focused on the sector’s contribution to quality patient care delivery.
4. MTIA recognized that the recently enacted HITECH Act (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) and healthcare reform present tremendous opportunities for the clinical documentation sector, as long as the sector is organized and focused.
5. “Discrete reportable transcription” can be integrated with EHR technology as a method of increasing EHR adoption.
6. With the number of consumers who are documenting their personal health stories continues to increase and more outcomes driven data coming from the provider community, there are new dynamic business models being created for the clinical documentation sector.
7. The Health Story Project promotes and enhances the value of narrative text in the age of EHRs by producing and encouraging the adoption of  standards for the flow of information between common types of healthcare documents and EHRs.
8. The SRT Summit held an active dialogue concerning the impact of SRT on the clinical documentation sector with an ultimate goal of creating a white paper to assist MTSOs with the challenges of purchasing, adopting and implementing SRT.
9. The QA Summit reviewed essential elements of a quality assessment process and outlined key components and metrics in order to begin producing a widely accepted quality standard protocol that will serve the healthcare community as prudent, efficient, cost-effective, valid, reliable and scalable to ensure quality of all health records.