In today's cost-conscious and rapidly-changing economy, businesses of all types are keeping a keen eye on the bottom line. Outsourcing transcription can be more cost effective than using in-house secretarial staff and/or temporary workers to transcribe dictation. Consider the following:

• Most secretaries and administrative assistants are asked to transcribe on the assumption that "because they can type, they can transcribe." Transcription, however, requires a very different set of core competencies from copy typing. A transcriptionist functions more like a sign-language interpreter -- what goes in the transcriptionist's ears must come out of the transcriptionist's hands in the process of converting voice to text.

• In many office situations, transcriptionists are being asked to answer phones, double as a receptionist and do a variety of chores that ruin their concentration. This causes frustrating delays and can increase the percentage of errors in their work.

• The standard 4-to-1 ratio of transcription time to dictation time means that ten minutes of dictation requires at least 40 minutes of work from a professional transcriptionist.

How does this impact your office?

• If your office staff records 40 minutes of dictation per day, it is generating 200 minutes, or 3.3 hours of dictation per week. It would take an average transcriptionist 13 hours (more than 1.5 work days) to transcribe that amount of work. If that work could be outsourced to professional transcriptionists, your administrative support staff could have an entire extra day and a half's worth of time to handle matters that keep getting pushed aside. Re-engineering the work flow could significantly reduce the level of stress in your office, resulting in happier and more productive employees.

• The dumbing down of the American education system means that fewer office workers have top-notch transcription skills. By outsourcing transcription, your work is done by some of the finest "ears" in the business (professional medical transcriptionists) who are used to transcribing work from doctors who may not dictate grammatically correct sentence structure or speak English as a second language.

• Working with a transcription service helps speed up turnaround time on dictated documents while assuring continued coverage. You never have to worry about someone being on vacation, being sick, or quitting and leaving you in the lurch.

• If, by outsourcing the work, more transcriptionists can work on your account, then the work can be finished and returned to you more quickly.

• A good transcription service can help you standardize your work through the efficient use of boilerplate text and customized shortcuts. Look to professional transcriptionists for ways to work "smarter" rather than "harder."

Why have so many hospitals and clinics chosen to outsource transcription?

• Outsourcing the work saves on costly employee benefits packages.

• By outsourcing the work, floor space (real estate) which was previously used to support a line item expense can be converted to support a source of revenue.