Common errors in medical transcription can sometimes be fatal if errors are made during the transcribing process. This explains why the major part of the US healthcare industry is now opting for high-quality speech recognition software for transcribing medical orders.
Unfortunately, there still are certain physicians in the industry that abide by the traditional transcribing methods. Even the best medical transcription services could confuse certain medical terms. For better comprehension on the matter, we have listed down some of the most common medical transcription errors that could prove costly.
Words That Sound Similar
A proper treatment is dependent on a proper diagnosis, and a proper diagnosis is always at stake due to certain words that sound similar. It happens quite often that doctors leave their patients in the hands of regular physicians for minute tasks. One of them may be gathering medical information from the patient.
If the physician addresses a certain problem like dysphagia as dysphasia, or claustrum as colostrum, it could lead to the wrong transcription. Leading the patient to a cure he or she never required.
Grammar and Spelling Mistakes
Let’s suppose the physician does not make any mistakes in pronunciation. But if the knowledge of the medical transcriber is not as dependable, similar sounding words may be misspelled. Making the term inaccurate or relatable to some other disease. This can also lead to treatments that a patient does not need.
Numeric Errors
Another one of the very common errors medical transcribers make is that they mix up numerical values. These values are of utmost value when a doctor assigns a treatment. The problem here is that not all medicines are fit for everyone. Doctors prescribe patients a dosage based on their medical condition. For instance, if a doctor dictates 30 and the transcriber writes 3, or vice versa, the effects could be drastically different.
What’s the Cost?
Medical transcriptions errors could prove extremely costly. A lot of the patients around the world have had fatalities due to the above-mentioned transcription errors. A simple mishearing or typo can change the course of a treatment drastically. Unfortunately people may have to pay for those mistakes with their lives. No matter how good a transcriber is, life is not something worth risking.
How to Avoid Them?
Fortunately, there is a way around this matter and the US healthcare industry has already adopted it. Doctors here are using speech recognition software that allows them to transcribe documents in shorter time frames and with better accuracy.
Dragon Medical One is a great example of speech recognition software. It is faster, smarter, and contains one of the biggest libraries of medical terms embedded into the software, making it far more accurate than its predecessors ever were.
Voice recognition software has been used in this industry for a long time, and has grown smarter with the launch of every new generation.