BASIC TIPS

Make sure your transcriber/ MT equipment’s is in good shape.
Clean and service your transcriber regularly according to the owner's manual or have it serviced regularly at the dealer. By doing this, you will be able to save a lot of money.

Make sure you are comfortably seated.
You should always try to find the very best chair you, or your employer can reasonably afford. If there are protests about the cost of a really good ergonomic chair (they can easily cost from Php. 1700.00 to over Php. 49,000.00) remind your employer the cost involved if you do get work-related injuries caused by a poor chair. The cost of you going on medical leave will be much more detrimental to your employer than the initial cost of good ergonomic furniture. Following proper procedures to avoid work-related repetitive stress injury will ensure you have a long transcribing career.

Try to keep your work environment quiet.
Seasoned medical transcriptionists know how important it is to have their surroundings as quiet as possible. No doubt this is sometimes impossible, especially when you are in a busy transcription pool with people coming and going. Fast, accurate transcription is most attainable when you can concentrate on the dictated words and virtually nothing else. While you are able to transcribe with ambient noise, speed and accuracy are almost always adversely affected. Working in a transcription pool, make sure your supervisor keeps regular "office traffic" away from your area. If your place of work does not have rules about a quiet zone for medical transcription, you may want to raise this idea with your supervisor or employer.

Would You Please Repeat That – Slowly.
Many physicians are so bad at dictating that you need some special techniques to understand exactly what they are saying. If you find it very difficult to understand a particular dictator, try these approaches:
If your transcriber has a "tone" adjustment, make sure it is set to make the dictator's voice sound "raw" - i.e., little or no bass. Do the same if you have a "bass" control. Removing as much bass as possible allows the words to be heard more clearly. Unfortunately it may also accentuate any static on the tape.
Try adjusting the tape playback speed from very, very slow to fast. Sometimes varying the speed of the tape transport will allow you to pick up on what is being said.
Try unplugging your headset and playing the tape out of the transcriber speaker, if there is one.
Try having someone else listen to the passage you are having trouble with (remembering confidentiality issues, of course).
Make a note where the unintelligible section is on the tape, using your tape counter, and come back later to see if being away from it for a while helps you to "listen anew."

One or a combination of all these approaches will sometimes help.

No Guessing.
Avoid guessing about what you hear. If the problem dictation involves drug names, drug dosages, patient-described symptoms, etc., guessing incorrectly could have life-threatening implications if your error goes through the health system unnoticed. The safest, professional, and ethical approach is to leave a blank in the transcription, making sure to make a notification on the report about the area of dictation needing clarification by the dictating physician. Of course, if there is a way to verify what is being said by contacting the actual dictating physician or his/her staff, this is the best, quickest and sometimes easiest way to handle questions about problem tape passages.

Maximizing Keyboarding.
One of the ways to ensure you are getting as much work done as possible is to make use of abbreviations. If you are serious about making medical transcription as a career, you really have to learn to use abbreviations to speed up your work. Some word-processors have spelling features that allow you to use auto-correction when transcribing at your computer. You can use this feature to expand words "on the fly."
For instance, instead of having to always type "examination," you can instruct the speller to expand an abbreviation like "exn" to the word "examination."

Get Rid of Rodents.
Most professionals who use word-processing software avoid using their desktop mouse like the plague. Taking your fingers from the keyboard slows you down, so if you want to really churn out the work you must learn keyboard shortcuts for as many actions as possible. Most word-processors give a keyboard equivalent for an action you point to with your mouse, especially on main menu items.

Using shortcut keys in Windows.
Learning the shortcut keystrokes for Windows (see table below) will help you perform general program actions faster. Many of the Windows commands are common to most windows programs. If you are currently using word-processor specific commands that correspond to the commands below, you may want to consider changing your word-processor preferences to match these common shortcut keys.

To ...................................................Press

Activate the menu bar in programs ..........F10
Carry out the corresponding command on the menu ..ALT+ underlined letter in menu
Close current window .......................CTRL+F4
Close current window or quit ..........................ALT+F4
Copy .............................CTRL+C
Cut ..............................................CTRL+X
Delete........................................ DELETE
Help on selected dialog box item ................F1
Current window’s system menu ....................ALT+Spacebar
Shortcut menu for selected item ...............SHIFT+F10
Display the Start menu .......................CTRL+ESC
System menu for MDI programs .............ALT+HYPHEN
Paste ....................................................CTRL+V
Undo ....................................CTRL+Z

Switch to the window you last used -Or- Switch to other window
...ALT+TAB holding down ALT while TAB by repeatedly pressing


I hope that you were able to get something from these...

Thank You and God Speed Mozcom

What is the NPI number?

We're all supposed to keep track of so many numbers in the patient record. There's the social security number, the MRN, the job number. Now there's this new NPI #. What exactly is it?

I myself am just starting to learn the ins and outs of medical billing here in the U.S., which is the lifeblood of doctor's offices. Let me start with how doctors here get their money.

Unlike in the Philippines, patients here don't typically go into a doctor's office and pay for their visit. Most have insurance and their doctors are responsible for submitting what are called "claims" to the patient's insurance company to let them know that the patient came to their office for such and such a procedure or exam etc... The Insurance company, then determines whether the claim is covered in the patient's insurance policy and either rejects the claim or approves it and then sends a check to the doctor.

Enter the NPI number. Starting this year, Medicare (the government-run insurance company for older Americans 65 and up) are requiring that doctors apply for an NPI or Nationa Provider Identifier number to speed up the claims process. Doctors are having big problems with this, because imagine the headaches. First they have to apply for one. Second, the current "claims" forms don't have a spot for this NPI number, meaning there's a new version of the claim form that they have to get now. Then, for those who bought billing software to electronically send in their claims, they have to pay money to make sure the software accomodates this new NPI number.

There's more to it than that, but that's what MTs should know at least about the NPI#
What does this mean for us? Well, I suspect you will see more and more doctors wanting their NPI#s on their patient records. Now you know how important this number is for a doctor, because if it's not filled out or is wrong, the insurance will delay in sending the check and the doctor won't get paid.

Quality

Quality is probably the single most important factor in keeping a client. I wanted to open this up for discussion as it seems we are still making the same mistakes over and over. Diomar's suggestion on word expanders is a great start. Let's keep the ideas flowing until we have a rigid workflow that allows for very little errors to get through.

What about an editor's checklist? Do we have that for our editors? For example, the obvious, checking templates to make sure it's the accurate one, check patient name spelling, doctor spellings, headings, names of places. Is there an extra space after periods?

We need to start implementing creating a standard template in .dot format. Let's discuss this...