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How do you see medical transcription in the light of newly evolving technologies?
The future of medical transcription will only work if good enabling technology help evolve the practice. We are looking at issues around speech recognition technology, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and different ways of capturing handwriting. We really need to deploy these technologies to be able to better leverage data capture in healthcare specially as we start to see more and more institutions particularly.

What do you think of the quality of medical transcription done out of India?
The level of quality is variable because there are no true guidelines that people follow. It is very fragmented and isolated. We are looking at developing private sector regulatory approaches to set standards for educational practice. This is true when we think of exchanging health information across facilities and across physicians who practice.

What are your views on speech recognition as a threat to the medical transcription industry?
When you look at enabling technologies, you have also to look at the practice patterns of how clinicians work in the healthcare facility. Many physicians are now comfortable with the dictation that they are using now. But there is always a need to interface with the machine but the chances of errors are there. If you get an error in a medical record, it has impact on patient's safety. You need to look at data exchange across facilities. That error that you have can be propagated across facilities.

Why don't we have third party training provider in the medical transcription in India?
We are aware that there is no such thing in India. We are looking at engaging prospective training houses that could be endorsing our medical transcription programs. They can partner with Thomson Prometric as well as AAMT and set up a good training curriculum.

We are launching our level 1 medical transcription test. This industry came up few years ago, fizzled and again there is resurgence. There was not any method of evaluating efficiency of prospective candidates. There was no benchmark. There were very few takers in India for certified medical transcriptionist test because of high price points. We are trying to have an India specific price point. This test is going to be available from September.

We got to create a set of competencies for a transcriptionist and build that into an educational program and then in partnership with Prometric we worked on our credential programs and evaluate the core competencies at the knowledge Level I and the Level II the Certified Medical Transcriptionist.

Do you see China as a threat to India as a medical transcription offshoring destination?
That is very unlikely. I know China is putting a lot of money into education. But countries like India and the Philippines by the virtue of their history of English speaking have taken an edge over China.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in