Flexible timings and place of work and good remuneration are among factors that have made medical transcription a stable career option for thousands of Indians in recent times.
Medical transcription services from India are sought after by players in many other countries.
According to Suresh Nair, Head-India Operations of Nuance India, the prime reason is that Indians possess a good knowledge of languages and are quick learners of dialects and accents. This aids in efficient interpretation. Another reason is that medical transcription in India is more economical and cost-effective that in most other countries. These in turn have contributed towards the boom of medical transcription firms in India.
Medical transcription is the process of converting voice-recorded reports like discharge summary, detailed medical reports and operative reports, dictated by health care professionals, into textual format with and without the assistance of e-Scription technology. These textual reports later become official medical records that would be used by various hospital departments and organisations.
“Government guidelines mandate hospitals globally to maintain these reports for future references. Insurance companies require medical records including these physician notes for processing insurance claims,” says Suresh.
The educational requirement of a Medical Language Specialist (MLS), also known as Medical Transcriptionist (MT), varies from one employer to the other. “Although no formal education degree is required for anyone to be a medical language specialist, many complete certificate programmes that are supported by vocational schools and industry associations like Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and Medical Transcription Industry Alliance (MTIA).
There are also online schools that provide medical transcription training to ensure medical language specialists stay up-to-date with regulatory requirements in the healthcare industry. An experienced Medical Language Specialist could draw a monthly salary anywhere between Rs. 25,000 and 30,000 apart from incentives,” adds Suresh.
A medical transcriptionist, whose work can either be office-based and home-based, receives and reviews pre-recorded audio files from doctors, and also reassesses the transcribed documents for accuracy.
Accuracy plays a key role in medical transcription, which has been in existence since early 20th century, as even a minor error can have a serious consequence.
“The industry which began in India in 1996, reached a major milestone in 2004-2005. Today, around 300 training institutes and companies like Nuance Communications and M*Modal offer medical transcription services in India. A recent report indicated that the medical transcription industry in India is poised to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 4+% and reach US$ 1 billion by 2020,” remarks Suresh.
A spurt in demand for well-trained medical transcription professionals has led to an increase in the number of institutes offering courses on medical transcription.
Nuance which operates in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Coimbatore and Mumbai, as part of its all-India growth initiative, would be hiring about 3,000 Medical Language Specialists (MLSs) over the next two years.
