Sunday, September 16, 2007

Start

Welcome to "Dictation Therapy for Doctors "

Studies have shown that children learn better when the learning process is interactive and information can be fed to them in "snapshots." The same principle applies to medical students, health information managers, physicians and medical transcriptionists -- people who must process tremendously complex information as part of their daily work.

The interactive features now available in blogs have transformed this teaching tool into a fascinating journey through language, culture, and medicine while teaching readers everything they need to know about dictation, transcription, and how these two complex language skills fit into the world of health information management.


Who will benefit from reading this blog?

"Dictation Therapy For Doctors" has been designed to benefit a variety of people involved in the process of creating and maintaining medical records:

  • If you are a medical student, physician assistant or nurse practitioner, this blog will help you learn good dictation techniques, show you how to avoid developing sloppy work habits which handicap your co-workers, and describe the type of professional colleague you don't want to become.

  • If you are a practicing physician, you are probably being referred to this blog as a firm but friendly message that you need help with your dictation. Consider that gift an expression of "tough love."

  • If you supervise a Medical Record Department or transcription unit, this blog will be a valuable tool for developing effective methods for communicating with dictators; it can also provide helpful hints on how to re-engineer the dictation/transcription process to achieve greater productivity.

  • If you are a hospital administrator, this blog will give you new insights into the transcription industry, guide you in making any decisions about outsourcing transcription services, and explain how you can budget transcription costs more accurately by changing your basic unit of measurement.

  • If you are a risk manager, this blog will serve as a shrill wake-up call that focuses your attention on a critical area of physician liability that you may never have properly understood.

  • If you own a large medical data repository service, this blog will show you what needs to be fixed in order to sell the data you own to target marketers.


You Drive The Learning Experience

What happens when a consumer plays a video game? To a great extent, the consumer determines how the experience will evolve through a series of pre-programmed scenarios. Using a blog as a teaching tool offers the reader a similar experience. If you wish, you can follow the author's direct line of reasoning by choosing to follow the electronic path he has created with the navigational buttons that appear at the bottom of each post. (Note: When you do not see these buttons at the end of a post, simply click on your browser's Back button.)

If you wish to concentrate on several areas of the blog, you are free to do so by skipping around the Table of Contents.

A blog also offers readers an opportunity to print out any page in the blog without having to physically tear it from a textbook's binder.

The various Language Skills Worksheets and Consciousness Raising Exercises can either be used in a discussion group or as learning experiences for the individual reading the text. Obviously, the reader cannot fill in the blanks on these pages by entering data into the computer. However, if you wish to print any of these files for use as a teaching tool in a professional setting, all you need do is click on your web browser's "Print" icon.


Gerard Donelan's impish Cartoons can be printed and posted in a variety of high-impact places in hospitals and clinical settings. Suggested sites include doctor's lounges, Medical Record Departments, medical libraries, and nursing stations.

Finally, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, this blog contains a sprinkling of video clips. Some are historic, some amusing. Some are entertaining, some are highly informative. Occasionally, a video clip might seem downright rude and inappropriate. Rest assured that all of these video clips help to illustrate the challenges faced by dictating doctors and medical transcriptionists.

ENJOY!



Next: Preface

[Table of Contents] [Cartoons]
[Home] [Exercises] [Worksheets]

3 comments:

robert beal said...

Hello George,

I have a strong interest in contacting you regarding a nascent culture-shifting project at the 3,000-employee health care organization for which I am a transcriptionist-editor.

However, I believe it is incumbent on me to read your entire blog before, hopefully, talking to you.

I have been trying to print the content into a master document but cannot follow all the strings.

Do you have the content in a form in which I could read it in its entirety, regardless of how it is organized?

Thank you for all your work. It is a breath of fresh air.

Robert Beal
rbeal@peacehealth.org

robert beal said...

Hi again George,

I've been derailed a bit by a new directive to, yes, "type what they say," in order to try to increase the efficiency with which a language recognition system translates the providers' dictation.

This leads me to a fundamental question underlying any future efforts at continuous improvement.

Do you have any evidence that anyone other than medical transcription professionals has any significant concern about the quality of medical reports -- in our case, in the medical record?

Thanks again,
Robert Beal

P.S. Please redact my work e-mail from the previous post; I didn't realize it would show. I'm already sticking my neck out!

Unknown said...

I had one recently where the doctor (foreign) was obviously reading from another transcribed report, but the gentleman could not read English well. Now mind you, this was an MD, a licensed professional in the USA to give medical treatment to critically ill individuals. He dictated "The patient is a bed rider." Looking back on prior reports and noticing the patient had multiple sclerosis, obviously the patient was "bed ridden". With the recent onslaught of big facilities transitioning over to voice recognition (an oxymoron) in itself, hiring fresh out of high school twits to "edit" reports, I cringe at the thought of what the medical record is going to become in a short period of time. I refuse to edit. Traditional transcription or nothing for this 30 year MT. The old saying "You get what you pay for" will NEVER be so true as the new speech recognized and edited reports.