Medical Transcription

October 20, 2008

Many prospective students have heard that “medical transcription is going away” and that it is a dying profession, a dead-end career, that the electronic medical record will replace the need for medical transcriptionists. This is not the case. Let us offer some valuable information that will help to clarify the future of the traditional medical transcriptionist and the important role that they play in the healthcare system.

What does a medical transcriptionist do?

In the broadest sense, medical transcription is the act of translating from oral to written form (on paper or electronically) the record of a person’s medical history, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, and outcome.

The industry is moving toward electronic health records, allowing storage of an individual’s health history so that it can be accessed by physicians and other healthcare providers anywhere.

Physicians and other healthcare providers employ state-of-the-art electronic technology to dictate and transmit highly technical and confidential information about their patients. These medical professionals rely on skilled medical transcriptionists to transform spoken words into comprehensive records that accurately communicate medical information. Speech recognition systems also may be used as an intermediary to translate the medical professional’s dictation into rough draft. The medical transcriptionist further refines the draft into a finished document.

Keyboarding and transcription should not be confused. The primary skills necessary for performance of quality medical transcription are extensive medical knowledge and understanding, sound judgment, deductive reasoning, and the ability to detect medical inconsistencies in dictation. For example, a diagnosis inconsistent with the patient’s history and symptoms may be mistakenly dictated. The medical transcriptionist questions, seeks clarification, verifies the information, and enters the correct information into the report.

-ADHI website

For more information, please visit the ADHI (Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity) website at http://www.ahdionline.org/scriptcontent/aboutmt.cfm

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Medical Office Administration

October 20, 2008

OWATC’s Medical Office Administration program trains students in the skills necessary to provide administrative support to the physician’s medical office. Students are trained in telephone skills, filing and file maintenance, scheduling appointments, and maintaining patient accounts. In addition, students are introduced to coding and billing concepts that are key factors in the financial success of a medical practice.

A Virtual Medical Office component allows students to train in an office setting without leaving the classroom!

Many students find that training in this area provides them with a solid foundation that can be used as a springboard into additional careers in the field of healthcare services.

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What do Medical Coders do?

September 4, 2008

A medical coder is responsible for reviewing medical documentation and assigning diagnosis codes (ICD-9-CM) and procedural codes (CPT4) for reporting and billing purposes. At Ogden-Weber Tech College, our program focuses on physician-based coding which primarily deals with outpatient care, i.e. in physician offices and clinics. A medical coder is often a detective as their skills include looking for information that supports procedures that were performed and assigning correct diagnoses codes to accurately describe a patient’s medical condition and services that were provided by a physician.

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