Speed and accuracy are as important in healthcare documentation as the knowledge of medical terminology. Learning about human anatomy, health conditions and other medical terminology is one aspect and typing with speed and accuracy is another aspect; mastering these two skills simultaneously is not impossible although it’s a challenging task. If you want to become a proficient healthcare documentation specialist, it’s imperative that you possess good knowledge of medical terminology along with great English typing skills with exceptional accuracy and speed. To ensure that your work meets the highest standards of accuracy while accomplishing quick turnaround times, you must acquire the skills of healthcare documentation and practice a lot.
- Get clear audio: The basic requirement of the healthcare documentation process is transcribing audio files into prescribed-format documents. So, the first step to improve your healthcare documentation skills is to get clear audio recordings to work. Once you get clear audio, listen to the whole audio once before starting transcribing. Although this may seem to be a time-consuming process, it will help you get a clear and complete picture of the file making it easier for you to transcribe it later. This will also help you to get a hold of the context and content of the audio file if the accent in the audio file differs from what you are accustomed to. This is all the more significant if you are working for clients with various accents.
- Transcribe sentence by sentence: Experienced healthcare documentation specialists suggest listening to the whole sentence before transcribing it rather than transcribing after listening to a few words or phrases. This will improve clarity on context thereby reducing the scope for grammatical and contextual errors which otherwise need to be corrected later on increasing the time taken to proofread and edit the document.
- Maintain accuracy: It’s agreed that speed is critical for people in healthcare documentation jobs; however, you must work at accuracy on priority. Focusing on only speed will delay your task completion as correction of typos and other errors will consume more time than needed. Further, health information documented erroneously, if sent to the client without making corrections, can ruin your reputation and also impact the quality of healthcare provided based on this erroneous document which can be detrimental to the patient.
- Upgrade editing skills: If you want to become an expert medical transcriptionist, it’s not enough if you have typing skills and medical terminology knowledge to transcribe a document; you must have excellent editing skills to rectify errors right away and send a flawless document to the client. You must ensure that your document is error-free regarding spellings, grammar, medical terms, patient information and the medical condition.
- Increase speed: Once you are confident about your accuracy, you must focus on speed as well. Keep practicing whenever you get the time and improve your typing speed to meet the deadlines and send your reports to the client within the turnaround time.
- Update medical terminology: Acquiring knowledge should be a continuous process for people working in healthcare documentation companies because the healthcare industry is ever-evolving and you need to keep yourself updated with the latest news in the healthcare industry, trends in treatment methods and new medicines or diagnostic methods. Keep expanding your knowledge to comprehend the audio files with ease and transcribe effortlessly.
Practice these tips and master healthcare documentation skills to become an expert medical transcriptionist. Passion to work in the healthcare industry, a flair for writing and documenting, an eye for detail, good grammar skills, excellent typing speed and impeccable accuracy can help you in becoming the most sought after in the healthcare documentation jobs.