Here are seveeral helpful hints if your hospital, clinic, or multi-physician practice is giving serious consideration to outsourcing transcription:

• Hardware/Software compatability: Just as laparoscopes changed the way many surgical procedures are performed, emerging computer technology has had a dramatic impact on the dictation/transcription process. Make sure your medical records staff and transcription service are using compatible hardware and software.

• Pay careful attention to units of measurement: A digital dictation system allows you to measure the length of each dictation to the 10th or 100th of a minute. Although most agencies charge by the line, a better system of measuring productivity is to adopt the minute of recorded dictation time as your standard unit of measurement.

• Always ask about the ability to track documents: The reporting capabilities of a digital dictation system should facilitate greater accuracy in logging dictated documents. A transcription service which uses a digital dictation system should have a user-friendly method of tracking transcribed documents. The agency that transcribes your work should be able to locate any archived document in less than three minutes.

• Lost time is lost money: Recording dictation onto tapes (which must be manually transported to the transcriptionist) can add as much as two days to turnaround time. With a digital dictation system, a physician's dictation is available to medical transcriptionists as soon as that doctor hangs up the phone.

• Respect the skills and services you are paying for: Medical transcriptionists are medical language specialists who must possess a unique set of core competencies in order to convert voice to text. Like Sign Language interpreters, what goes into their ears must come out through their fingers. In the Health Information Management (HIM) arena -- where many people speak English as a second language -- professional medical transcriptionists serve as a physician's first line of defense against medical malpractice attorneys. They are an invisible -- and yet invaluable -- part of the patient care team.

• Remember that clerks cost less than medical transcriptionists: With today's technology, it is much more cost efficient to have documents transcribed at a remote location and transmitted electronically to your office where a medical records clerk or volunteer can supervise the process of printing files.