MedQuist contributes to new industry standard measurement policy for transcription jobs

MedQuist Inc. (Nasdaq: MEDQ), a leading provider of technology-enabled clinical documentation services, continues to support industry best practices for quality standards and metrics.  Together with the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), the Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) and other industry quality leaders, MedQuist contributed to the new Healthcare Documentation Quality Assessment and Management Best Practices just unveiled at the AHDI 32nd Annual Convention and Expo.

This new set of industry standards clearly spells out how to define errors in clinical documentation, to ensure quality and consistency of records for various purposes including automated decision support, research, and core measure outcomes.  

According to DeeAnn Logan, MedQuist vice president of Quality, MedQuist was an active and collaborative participant with AHDI, MTIA and AHIMA in the standards development process.  "We were pleased to be able to represent our customers' experience in the discussion of process improvement for the entire industry," she states.  "With a simple, straightforward, readily adoptable methodology in place, customers of all Medical Transcription Service Organizations (MTSOs) can now have confidence that their providers are on the same page when they define quality scores as being at or above 98."

Among the other advantages to the new standards, Logan cites:

• Having an industry standard measurement policy will, for the first time, allow for an apples-to-apples comparison among MTSOs.
• Detailed error definitions by category are provided, to minimize subjectivity.
• The new methodology has a stronger focus on critical errors; i.e., ensuring that all audited reports that contain a Patient Safety/Critical error will fail the job.  
• For the first time, best practices for blanks are outlined.  (Previous methods did not address these.)
• The policy provides recommendations for roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders involved in the creation of medical records.

Logan notes, "MedQuist is committed to delivery of the highest level of quality patient care documentation to our customers. We believe we have the right blend of process, roles, resources, training and technology -- including automated quality checks, alerts and monitoring of transcription jobs throughout the workflow (both pre- and post-delivery) -- to achieve this goal.  We have already implemented more accurate, real-time, immediate feedback to our medical transcriptionists, for proactive, continuous quality improvement and learning.  With all of this in place, we anticipate quick adoption of the new standards, especially since we previously implemented the 2007 AHDI Quality Standards."