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When your hospital or medical office makes the choice to find a transcription company that can manage the task of medical transcription, there are a number of different things that you should be looking for. First, you want to be absolutely certain that your outsourced medical transcription information is secure; you want to know that the transcription company that you work with is HIPAA compliant and that they take every possible step to ensure that your patients' files and information are secure. Then you want to be sure that there is no risk that you will be overcharged for the transcription work that is done for you.

Some medical transcription companies look at the work that you send them as simply money in the bank. They quote you a fee based on the page - but what they don't tell you is that there are factors that can affect the amount of information that fits on the page. They aren't clear about the size of the margins on each page, what font they'll use or how many lines fit on the page. The same concerns arise if the transcription company that you use charges by the report: whether your report is ' page long or 1 page , you're paying the same amount.

Some medical transcription companies also charge work based on the concept of the "gross line" - if a line has text on it, it's counted, blank lines are skipped. Just like medical transcription costs that are calculated by the page and by the report, however, this can lead to some variability when the cost is calculated. Different fonts can make it so that fewer characters fit onto a line. Larger margins can reduce the amount of space for text; so can the ways in which the formatting and justification are set by the transcription company.

Well, what about a transcription company that charges by the minute - that could be fair right? It often sounds as thought this is an ideal way for a medical transcription vendor to calculate cost, until you consider the fact that different dictation systems produce different dictation times, as does the rate of speech for those individuals who dictate their notes. In other words, when your outsourced medical transcription is billed by the minute, it's still difficult to know whether or not the price that you're getting is fair for the work that's being done.

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The only way to know that your medical transcription costs are being calculated fairly is to know that the transcription company that you're working with focuses on character lines as defined by the American Association for Medical Transcription. This definition is clear: a line is defined by the number of characters - letters, numbers, spaces and punctuation - necessary to the report. A set number of characters will be defined as a line by the transcription company, and a fair price will then be set.

Transdyne calculates their medical transcription costs based on character lines as this is the only fair and honest way for the costs of services to be determined. Does your transcription company do the same?