Friday, September 14, 2007

The Hidden Costs of Managing People

Even if your office is a busy multi-physician practice, it is cheaper to outsource transcription to a service agency whose contract demands a specific turnaround time. Why?
To keep a medical transcriptionist on staff you must cover the costs of maintaining a full-time employee. These include:

  • Vacation time.

  • Sick pay.

  • Health benefits.

  • Replacement help when the person is sick or on vacation.

  • Full payment for downtime when work is slow.
To keep a medical transcriptionist on staff you must manage one more person in your office. This can involve:
  • Personality problems.

  • Someone who does not appear to be busy at all times because of the ebb and flow of dictation.

  • Someone who might leave your practice for another job (requiring you to train another employee).
Hiring an in-house transcriptionist does not mean that you get the best talent for the job (the best medical transcriptionists are working on a production basis, using the latest technology to make more money).

Hiring an in-house medical transcriptionist gets you someone who is looking for job security and medical benefits. That person does not necessarily know a lot about computers and productivity.

Having the ability to dictate from any touch-tone phone allows you to handle correspondence from your office or home at any time of the day or night. As soon as you hang up the phone, your work is placed into an electronic queue where it awaits the transcriptionist who will transform your spoken words into a written document.
The next step is to make sure that you take advantage of today's technology to receive your finished work in an electronic format (whether it is arriving from the hospital, from a transcription agency, or from an independent contractor).


Next: Equipping Your Office For Electronic File Transfers

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