Thursday, September 6, 2007

Did You Know?

Did you know that one of the cardinal rules of medical transcription is that if a doctor attempts to spell a word for you, chances are he will spell it wrong? Look it up and you will often discover that the more adamant a doctor gets about insisting a word be spelled a certain way, the more likely he is to spell it incorrectly!

Did you know that when listing a patient's discharge diagnoses and medications, most dictating doctors cannot count from 1 to 10?

Did you know that an emergency room doctor can hold a bottle of pills in his hand, read the label from the pharmacy and still manage to misspell the name of a patient's medication?

Did you know that the words spoken by a dictating physician into a telephone or hand-held tape recorder when no one is looking represent a critical issue in risk management?

You do now!With that knowledge, ask yourself:

What should be done if doctors are deaf to warnings about their vulnerability to medical malpractice lawsuits?

What should be done if doctors insist that whenever medical transcriptionists try to point out serious errors in patient documentation, medical transcriptionists are merely "crying wolf"?

What happens when the owners of medical transcription agencies are so concerned with delivering reports that have strong cosmetic appeal that they push transcriptionists to guess what a mumbling physician might be trying to say instead of leaving an appropriate number of blank spaces?

What's wrong with this picture?

[Consciousness Raising Exercise #6]

Next: What's Wrong With This Picture?

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