The recent partnership of the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) and the Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) has the medical transcription industry excited. While the joint venture began two years ago, both organizations are now committed to solving some of the industry’s most grueling challenges. The goals of the partnership are to create and implement industry standards and improve the quality of service across all companies.
MTSOs and documentation specialists are starting to work together to try to increase turnaround times and better manage data. AHDI and MTIA want to compile research to establish uniform turnaround time guidelines. With these guidelines in place, medical practices could pay premiums to medical transcription services that provide faster turnaround times. The hope is that these new guidelines will increase the quality of the medical transcription industry.
A quality assurance (QA) program is also in the works, which would monitor documentation accuracy and vastly improve transcription performance. The QA program, along with outlining document formatting standards across the industry, would also improve patient safety.
In addition, the two organizations want to continue educating medical transcription business owners on the privacy and security protections to prevent medical transcription service owners from having to pay fines for violating patients’ rights to privacy.
Lastly, the two partners intend to invest in speech recognition technology to bring the industry into the future of efficient transcription. At the 2009 MTIA Annual Conference industry stakeholders got together to review data collected about the incorporation of a speech recognition system.
In just two short years, AHDI and MTIA have taken big steps toward innovation. Instead of waiting for these advancements to happen naturally, the two organizations have taken on the challenges of improving transcription by themselves. They are making drastic improvements and the medical transcription industry will soon see the impacts of their hard work.
