
Errors made by medical transcriptionists and ways to prevent them.
October 08, 2024
The medical transcription service industry relies heavily on high-accuracy work by transcriptionists. They are intensely trained to give the best output even with many limitations. However, from time to time, errors do crop up in medical documents.
Some of the most common errors that are seen are
- Wrong transcriptions due to difficulties in hearing the dictation properly due to poor audio quality.
- Mistakes in spelling words correctly, i.e., words that are wrongly spelled, words that are spelled correctly but which are contextually wrong, and correct words but with a spelling not used in that region, etc.
- Transcription of similar-sounding words gives rise to errors if the transcriptionist is not focused or unaware of the term.
- Transcriptionists, more often, tend to handle more than one client who requires different formatting styles, and hence, providing a document in another format, though correct, is considered an error.
- To put in place a sound quality control system handled by experienced personnel to proofread and double-check the produced documents.
- Provide state-of-the-art tools to the quality check department so that they can catch the errors easily and choose the appropriate formatting style as per the client's requirement.
- Constant updation of medical transcription software and equipment and retraining to keep up with the new changes in terminologies.
The best ways to prevent these errors are