Healthcare transcription: Pricing Way and the Profitability

The way of billing adopted by the medical transcription service provider could have an express impact on the hospital's profitability

Ultimately any healthcare facility is availing for specialist medical transcription services in looking forward to reducing expenditure and gain advantages. It is important to choose a company, which has a transparent and straightforward method of billing.

How difficult can it be? Surprisingly costing could be as straightforward or as complicated as the mode of billing applied by the service provider. This is an aspect that is worth studying in detail. According to the principles of CDIA the costing mode employed by a medical transcription company should be

Verifiable: The pricing mode employed by a medical transcription service provider should be easy to verify

Definable: The details and parameters of the costing way used by the medical transcription service provider should be defined in simple terms.

Quantifiable: Sometimes the method used by a medical transcription service provider ought to allow for clear understanding.

Constant: The way of billing should be consistent for easy understanding and simplicity of operation. Any deviations made in the mode of costing should be communicated to the customer to avoid inconsistencies

Open and clear: The costing way adopted by a medical transcription company should be a Fair and honest: depiction of fees for jobs executed

There are various Modes, utilized for billing, which have been summed up below:

Page: Each page of the report comprises a billable measure. The problem arises when there is a huge disparity in the substance of pages. They could end up disbursing the same amount for a page containing of 10 lines, as a page consisting of 45 lines. This would not be fair representation of reasonable compensation for services delivered.

Report: The total pages of completed transcription in a transcript comprise a billable unit. The difficulty arises when there is a huge disparity in the amount of pages in a report. A report could consist of anything between 1 page to 10 pages, which again is not indicative of correct compensation for services provided.

Minute: This means every minute of dictation represents a billable unit. This Mode may seem like a reasonable one until the hospital contemplates the different speeds of dictation, the interruptions and distractions faced by doctors during this process. They would be billed for those too!

Gross lines: Simply put, this method consists of actually counting the number of lines. The shortcoming with this Way is that it is dependent on the Way of formatting used. The amount billed could be more when a medical transcriptionist uses tabs and indents excessively.

Character Lines: Character lines are normally represented counting the characters in the completed report and dividing it by a fixed number, say 65. Space and returns are also included. This method is simple, fair and consistent. It has the benefit of being easily verifiable.

It would be correct to say that the Costing Way used by the service provider would certainly define the cost of transcription. Otherwise the healthcare provider may end up paying prices that are do not coincide to the services rendered and this would defeat the purpose of outsourcing by affecting the profitability negatively.