As a service to the medical facilities, Emdat, with very few exceptions, provides interfacing at no charge.  That is not always the case for EMR companies. At times, the costs charged for the EMR side of the interface can be prohibitive to moving forward. This is frustrating not only to transcription companies trying to win the business by providing better service, but also to the medical facilities which would realize  more value with their EMR. HL7 is the most common interface, but generally requires involvement for either the scheduling/demographic interface or textual/discrete interface back into the EMR.

If costs are prohibitive or cooperation is not forthcoming by the EMR software provider, we do have some options which are pretty straightforward and will save on cost. Don't panic - you can still interface to the scheduler to improve accuracy for the transcriptionist, and Emdat will store all transcriptions on our servers for as long as you are a client. Additionally we can bring past historical transcriptions...

For companies that pay attention to progress, every advancement in technology helps streamline an existing process, even if it was once thought it couldn't get any better.  With dictation, cassette tapes were first used to help offload the documentation of patient visits by freeing up some of the provider's time.  As telephone systems became popular, getting these audio files to typists that were off-site became easier, and reduced turnaround time for reports.  The internet had an almost immediate affect on how the dictation and transcription process could be made easier - transcriptions were now able to be transferred back to the physician electronically.  And as digital recorders became popular, physicians were able to use the software that came with these devices to transfer audio to the typists via e-mail or FTP.  But no system was available that really took advantage of every kind of dictation method, while keeping security of the process in mind.

The number of people on the internet has boomed.  Third...

Although it should be pretty straightforward to estimate your costs for transcription I have found that it has been very difficult to do a direct comparison without validating numbers. To make a complex comparison simple I will only look at billing by the line and not compare that to other methods of billing (page, word etc.). Generally speaking there are three ways to bill by the line:

The  standard which is 65 characters per line which will include spaces and punctuation. Basic (Gross) Method which counts each carriage return as a line. Microsoft Word which uses an embedded line word counter similar to the basic method. The differences in costs of these three measures can be as different as an apple to an orange.

Let me give you an example....

Emdat, Incorporated 857 Collins Blvd. Covington, Louisiana 70533

AAMT standard calculates this address as 1 line Basic (Gross) calculates this address as 3 lines Word calculates this address as 3...