Selecting the Best Transcription Services for Your Needs

Transcription services are available in various formats and they can be customized to meet your needs.A transcriptionist is a trained recorder of the spoken word.The main goal of a professional in this field is to supply error-free printed or written data. Hiring someone to transcribe data is a cost-effective solution and the superior practices, technology and skills used by the service provider guarantee that all audio/video will be converted in an articulate manner.

Data transcription is advantageous for business owners because capital expenditures can be avoided and resources can be saved. High in demand, transcriptionists can assist people in numerous industries, such as medical, legal, retail, hospitality, governmental and more. In order to get the most from this accurate, speedy and secure process, you should be able to distinguish between different transcription styles.

Verbatim

These transcription services require a lot of effort on the transcriptionist’s part. A sound recording will be played and each word typed out. Attention to detail and a keen ear are essential skills for Verbatim transcription. Also known as ‘True Verbatim’, this method requires no editing; therefore it is suitable for movie scripts, market interviews and research. Verbatim captures the true picture, giving the reader valid evidence, honest representations and better clarity. Recognized as the most detailed style of transcription, Verbatim follows a basic format and speaker identification is used to identify interviewers/interviewees.

Readable

Journalists, authors and bloggers should opt for Readable transcription services, which are otherwise known as ‘Intelligent Verbatim’. Non-verbal communication and ambient sounds are eliminated with this print-ready technique. Sounds like “ah” or “uhm” are removed from the text, but other important matters are focused on. Readable transcription services are utilized for business meetings, seminars, sales presentations, podcasts, videos, conference calls and phone memos. Although unnecessary words or noises will be excluded from the final product, the transcriptionist will not be able to change sentences around, or add words.

It is imperative that you consider your personal preferences and industry when choosing transcription services. Write a description of your projects, ask for recommendations and request quotes when looking for a vendor.

Benefits of Transcription Services

By outsourcing their transcription to a reliable service provider, healthcare professionals can gain many comprehensive benefits:

• Convenient dictation modes: The proofreaders, editors, trancriptionists will ensure you to transcribe dictated reports with dictation methods of toll free number and digital dictation machine to provide error-free transcripts and deliver on time.
• Accurate documentation: Accuracy in documentation is crucial to proper patient treatment and care. A professional transcription company has expert medical trancriptionists on the job which ensures accuracy levels of up to 99 percent.
• Quality check: A reliable service provider will deliver the transcripts to the clients only after performing multi-level quality assurance tests to assure the highest levels of accuracy.
• Security: A reliable firm is one that provides services that are secure and confidential in accordance with HIPAA norms. It is important for the service providers to have measures to protect patient data such as transfer of files via a secure FTP server or 256-bit AES encryption for all transferred files.
• Customized turnaround time: A competent transcription services provider offer turnaround time options that include 24 hour TAT and STAT.
• More time for core-issues: An experienced service provider helps healthcare providers save time to focus on patient care without any interruption.
• Cost savings: Reliable providers offer affordable transcription solutions which ensure their clients cost savings of up to 30-40 percent.

A competent medical transcription outsourcing company will provide personalized and secured access to medical documents with real time services. Also, outsourcing these services is an ideal option compared to setting up an in-house infrastructure for transcription. All your needs for medical transcription services can be met easily and affordably by choosing the right firm.

Business Transcription Services

Businesses and organizations have needed professional transcription services ever since they started fearing loosing to their competition. That is the reason why converting audio and video content into well written and professional transcripts has been a very good source of income for a lot of people for quite a long time now. Before the technological advancements in the modern electronics area, transcription was done by manual labor. That means that people would do the entire work themselves; they would listen to the audio or video files over and over again to try to make sure that they do not make any mistakes.

Over the years thought, with so many advancements in electronic equipment and computer systems and software  the job of a professional transcription services provider has become so much easier. There is so much new machinery available in the market now that makes the transcription work much efficient. Plus, with the help of voice recognition software  computers are able to convert the audio from any file into a text format all by itself up to 99% accuracy. All the transcription services provider has to do is to check the final transcripts to see if there are any grammatical or spelling mistakes before sending them to the customer.

Characteristics of Good Transcription Services

With so much intense business competition in the market these days, every business and organization is looking for good quality transcription services. That is the reason why there are a large number of transcription services providers and transcription companies offering professional transcription services. The only set back of having so many transcription services providers in the market is that the ones who can do the job right are very few in number and the rest of them are just out to scam their clients. If you want to get professional transcription services, here are a few things to consider before hiring someone.

Most of the time the transcription work that the transcription services providers do contains important information like classified data or strategies etc which is only restricted to the top management inside the organization. Transcribing that kind of data requires a good deal of confidentiality assurance which should be provided to the client so they can trust the service provider. Another thing to look for is how long have they been offering professional transcription services. The longer they have been in the business will mean that they truly have the skills and the experience to provide quality services because otherwise they would not have lasted that long.

Why Professional Transcription

Professional Transcription Services

It is repeated over and over again in a lot of different places that almost every organization in the world uses professional transcription services and it is true too. With all the new companies and organizations coming into the market everyday, the competition between them is getting more and more intense. That is the reason why they use professional transcription services rather than doing the work themselves and that is also why there are so many transcription services providers in the market these days.

There are a lot of different reasons why these organizations use professional transcription besides the fact that they want to beat their competition. The biggest reason is that with the help of professional external services, these organizations save a lot of their time to focus on their core functions and also it is a whole lot cheaper than staffing and paying a separate department just for transcription.

Another reason is that external transcription services providers offer transcripts which are professional in every manner. You will not have t worry about sending a letter to your customers and then your customers finding typos and spelling mistakes in the letter because that highly effects the reputation of your organization.

Medical Transcription

Medical Transcription

These days transcription services are being used by every business, every organization and a lot of other fields on almost a daily basis. Some of them use these services because they do not want to do it themselves; instead, they want to use that time to concentrate more on their basic goals and objectives. But, some of them use these services because they just do not have the time to do the transcription by themselves. Also, they want their transcription work to be as professional as it can get.

In all the different kinds of transcription services available in the market today, medical transcription is the oldest and the most used one as well. In the early days, physicians would just write down all the information they got from the patients themselves and on the spot. Then, after some time and with the increased use of the recording devices, professional services providers emerged who would do the transcription for a price.

As more and more transcription services providers came to the market, the competition increased and they started offering high quality services on low rates to attract more customers than others. These days tough, the quality has increased even more and the process has become even simpler with the invention of voice recognition software.

Transcription Charges Calculation

Transcription Services

Unlike a lot of other fields, in the transcription field there is no fixed rate for the process and not even a single way to calculate the charges. Every transcription services provider calculates the charges for his or her work by the method that suits them best. Of course, the customers are informed in the contract about the method they are going to be charged for the transcription work. Customers only make a contract with a service provider if they think the method of charging is also in their favor as well. Here are a few ways how transcription services providers charge for their work.

Some service providers like www.ezsmart.co.uk charge their customers according to per page of the transcription work they do. Some charge their customers according to the amount of lines they transcribe; in most cases the service providers look at one line of work as 65 key strokes. Some transcription services providers charge their customers on the basis of the amount of time they spend on a specific transcription work. This method is relatively expensive because usually the amount of time it takes to transcribe a recording or a dictation is almost more than five times the length of the recording.

Good Transcription Services

There are more and more transcription services providers coming to the market these days because of the constantly increasing demand of transcription services by almost every business and organization throughout the world. It does not matter what field an organization is related to for it to require these services because transcription is used in almost every area and every area requires a different set of guidelines for transcription. Most of the time transcription is even named according to the nature of work being transcribed like medical transcription is for health care industry, legal transcription is for law firms and such, academic transcription is for students and professors etc.

The size of the entity providing transcription services does not matter as long as the quality of services provided is good; it can be one person sitting in his home providing transcription services or it can be an entire company. All that the services provider has to make sure is that the work is done within a minimum amount of time, the work should be accurate and the service provider should not leak privilege information. Plus, the service provider needs to have a good deal of knowledge about the field he is transcribing his work in, for example, a medical transcriptionist should have knowledge about medicine.

Importance of Transcription Services

Transcription Services

Almost every business these days hires an external transcription services provider to help get its transcription work done; whether it is a transcription company like www.ezsmart.co.uk/ or an individual professional who works from home. The reason why these businesses prefer an external services provider over hiring their own employees is to minimize their manufacturing and operating costs and to increase their efficiency. Also, this way they can save a lot of their valuable time to focus on their main objectives like manufacturing high quality products or providing high quality services.

In every business and organization there are need for interviews, meetings and conferences etc and these events take place consistently. But the organizations also need to keep a record of everything that goes on which is why they need all their recorded interviews, meetings and conferences to be in the shape of hard copies. This is what transcription services providers do; they receive audio or video files, recordings of the proceedings mentioned earlier, and their job is to extract that audio file and put every word of it in a text format preferably a Microsoft Word document. The services providers make sure that they provide high quality transcripts with no mistakes and with proper punctuations where needed.

Medical Transcription Providers

Medical Transcription Providers

Medical transcription is used to make and maintain hard copies of patients’ records by converting the audio recordings of the conversations between a patient and a health care professional and the additional notes which are recorded later by the health care professional into a well written text format. Although, it sounds like an easy job to transcribe medical recordings into text form but only the people who do the job are aware of the challenges they face to make a good transcript.

There are a lot of things that medical transcribers have to consider and make sure they do not mess anything up if they want to offer good quality medical transcription services. In order to be able to provide medical transcription services, an individual has to have all the necessary skills like he should have a good enough knowledge of the medical field, he should know every short word, every terminology and every abbreviation that is normally used in the medical recordings and he should have a good sense of the grammar, correct spellings and any required punctuation  Plus, before someone can become a professional medical transcription services provider, he has to go through a certain amount of necessary training process.

Audio Transcription Services

Audio Transcription Services

Audio transcription is the process of converting an audio file in a well written text form and if the audio file is a part of a video like a YouTube video or a video recording of a seminar etc then the audio has to be extracted from the video before the transcription process can be done. In the early stages, there was only manual labor assigned to do the audio transcription but these days the demand for transcription services have raised so much that voice recognition software have been invented to do all the transcription work automatically.

Still, transcription is not just about putting the spoken words into letters but the transcription services provider also has to make sure that the transcripts does not have any grammatical mistakes and that accurate use of punctuation has been done where it was needed. It is because of that fact that using manual transcription services is far better than using a voice recognition software to do the job. Manual transcription services providers work according to the requirements of their clients and follow certain rules; rules that vary depending on the purpose of the transcription whereas voice recognition software only translates an audio file into a text file.

Medical Transcription and Typing

The ability to provide good typing services is something that a medical transcription services company must have because unlike many other fields of transcription, medical transcription requires a good amount of knowledge about the medicine and the terminologies which are used in most of the recordings. Plus, before a person can be able to start providing medical transcription services or work for a medical transcription company, he or she has to be well trained in the transcription process as well as the typing field.

It is because of the experience that the medical transcription services providers display in their work that they are chosen by hundreds of hospitals, physicians and other health care professionals all over the world. Medical transcription providers always make sure that the work they do has the three most important and basic characteristics: (1) proper grammar, (2) punctuation where needed and (3) minimum or no spelling mistakes. Many medical transcription companies even ensure in their contract to have these characteristics in their work. Since the medical transcription companies only employ people who can offer good typing services and know the various terminologies used in the recording, they tend to have very quick turnaround times which is another benefit of hiring these companies.

Transcription Cost Comparison

Transcription services help various businesses and organization to reduce their operating costs and increase their productivity at the same time. There are a lot of transcription services providers in the market these days because the need for transcription rises more every day. So, there are a lot of factors that you need to take under consideration when choosing a transcription services provider like quality of work, confidentiality and turnaround times but the most important factor to consider is the cost of transcription because the main reason for getting transcription services is to reduce your costs.

Transcription Services

There are a lot of ways how transcription services providers charge for their work, for example, charge per page, per minute of their work, per line, per word and some even charge per character and per key stroke. All these methods vary from one service provider to another and can also affect your cost with high variability so always prefer a services provider who will take time to explain their charging method to you. Still, you will have to compare the transcription costs you will endure from different service providers and the best way to do that is to provide each service provider a sample document and ask them how much would that transcription work cost you.

Transcription Services and its Types

Transcription Services

Transcription is generally defined as the process of converting various types of audio file into well written and clearly readable text formats. The need for transcription services is becoming more and more everyday and businesses and professionals from every field need transcription services these days. This is also the reason why there are so many different types of transcription services.

Legal Transcription: this is used by courts, attorneys and law firms for depositions and court hearings etc. Medical Transcription: this is used by health care centers and physicians for patient summaries and patient progress reports etc. Academic Transcription: this is used by schools, universities and PhD students for their academic documents like assignments and thesis reports etc. Business Transcription: this is used by various businessmen for any type of office needs.

Dissertation Transcription: this is used by PhD students when they are completing their dissertation and they mainly use it for a bunch of interviews that they took. Market Research Transcription: this is used by marketers for different types of market research. Podcast Transcription: this is used by podcasters who want to post their podcasts on their website as well as broadcasting them live. If you know which transcription service you need, you can easily choose the best transcription company for yourself.

Medical Transcription Services

Medical Transcription

The patients’ records are very important for the physicians and health care centers and other medical professional to further review those files and also for taking continuous care of the patient. These recordings are first dictated into an audio recording device and then are transcribed by medical transcription services providers. Providing medical transcription is not an easy job, it requires a great knowledge of the various medical terminologies which are frequently used by physicians and health care centers in their recordings. Also, there are other reasons why physicians and health care centers go for medical transcriptions services.
Everyone requiring medical transcription services wants to get the best and what makes a certain medical transcription services provider better than the rest are the following factors. The end transcripts provided by the service provider must be accurate and have no errors or mistakes at all because even a small mistake in a medical record can have a serious affect on the patient’s health. The services provided must not cost too much otherwise it is better to just do them in house. Health care centers can save 30-40 percent of their costs if they use the right service provider. The service provider must also have a good turnaround time so the physician can have the records within time.

Types of Transcription Services

Types of Transcription Services

According to the oxford dictionary, the word transcription means “a written or printed version of something”. Normally transcription is defined as converting various recorded speeches into well written form. Almost every organization requires transcription services but not all of them are the same because of the difference in the nature of the organizations. The few common types of transcription services are given below.

Medical Transcription: it is also known as MT; it is related to the health care profession and is usually referred by doctors and other health care professionals. MT deals with converting audio recordings of the patients into various text formats. Legal Transcription: it is generally used to convert court hearings, depositions and other legal processes into text formats. Legal firms and court reporters also use this type of transcription to get their recordings in written form.

Financial Transcription: this type of transcription is often used by the financial firms for their converting their financial reports, financial summary, analysis reports and different events etc into various kinds of text format. Media Transcription: this type of transcription is used by the entertainment industry. A good example of media transcription would be the text displayed on a television screen during a program.

Per Line of Text Transcription Charging

Transcription Services

There are so many different types of transcription services available in the market these days. Like anything else in the market, these transcription services have different levels of charges. Some of them cost a lot of money while others cost much less than that. Mostly, the difference in the costs because of the quality of the transcripts but it is also because of the different charging methods used by the transcription services providers. The most frequently and commonly used transcription charging method is called per line of typed text method.

Per line of typed text is normally explained as: a common measurement instrument has been set which puts one typed line of a transcription to be equal to sixty five key strokes. The way it works is that the transcription services providers and their customers agree on a fixed rate per one key stroke and then the customer is charged according to the number of keystrokes transcribed for him or her. This method is used a lot in medical transcription industry than any other field. This is a very effective method of charging for transcription but it comes with a risk. The customer does not know how much he or she is going to pay for the transcription services until the final bill arrives.

Transcription Services from Home

Transcription Services

Offering transcription services from home is a great way to earn at least a few hundred dollars a month. Transcription service companies sometimes prefer one transcriptionist who works from home over another in which case the later struggle to find work while the former is busy all the time. Here is how you can make yourself indispensable so you never go out of work.

First thing you should keep in mind is to always spell check and proofread your work. Most people ignore to do this simple work and when the quality assurance manager at the transcription company finds these mistakes multiple times by the same transcriptionist, he or she stops giving work to that person.

Another thing to keep in mind is to maintain a good turnaround time and always making your deadlines. If you have not been given a fixed deadline then it does not mean that you have as long as you want to finish the job and for some reason you are going to miss a deadline then inform the job manager well on time.

Also, do not be too picky; be willing to transcribe the bad quality audio too if you are given any. Tell the project manager, if you know you can not get a good transcript out of an audio, as soon as possible.

Charging Models for Transcription Services

Medical Transcription Services

If you have had transcription services before, you will know that some charge a lot of money while others, not so much. This is because of the difference between the transcription companies’ charging models. The most common transcription services charging models are given below.

Fixed Price: in this model charging a customer will submit his/her audio to be transcribed and the transcription services provider will provide a quote which will be valid for that customer’s work only. The services provider take several features like audio quality, number of speakers, turnaround time, previous work relationships with that customer etc into consideration before providing the quote.

Per Line Of Typed Text: this model is mostly used in the medical transcription industry. Normally, one line of transcription is considered equal to 65 key strokes according to which the customer is charged. How it works is that the transcription provider will normally have an agreed rate per key stroke with the customer and charge the customer for these key strokes.

Per Minute Of Audio: this model is becoming the most common one used. In this model, the transcription services provider charges the customers by the length of the audio that need to be transcribed.

Professional Transcribers

If you are searching for transcription services, you can easily find a lot of companies that offer them. But, everyone wants the best; so how would you know which company provides better transcription services than the others? Finding that out is very simple; you just need to consider a few things.

A transcription company must have enough transcribers for the amount of clients they take. To put it in another way, they should not take more clients than they can handle which lowers the quality of their services and work. The transcription company must only employ people with a technical degree and a good amount of experience in the field to handle the transcription process.

Make sure the company is not the habit of rushing things, they should at least listen to the recording a second time before processing it further. Sometimes, there are names or medical terminologies that a transcriptionist might not know. The transcriptionist must be willing spend some extra time to research these terminologies to avoid any mistakes. The transcription company should brief the clients on how their work is done so they do not have any unrealistic expectations especially when it comes to time consumption; normally, a one hour recording takes almost four hours to transcribe.

Transcription Process

Medical transcripts are very important especially for future visits of a patient. A medical transcript is a record file of the patient’s history. The medical transcription process starts when the medical practitioner sees a patient. The practitioner asks the patient questions about his or her condition and the patient gives information about all the issues. The medical practitioner then orders additional tests or simply makes diagnosis.

After the patient has left, the medical practitioner records the patient information onto a recording device or sometimes the interview with the patient is been recorded. This information is then sent to the medical transcriptionist. The recordings are then converted in to a proper format. The transcriptionists can not make any changes in the recordings except for grammatical errors. Any errors or problems are flagged for further review. A medical transcriptionist must have a sufficient amount of medical knowledge and access to resources that can ensure that his/her work is accurate. Transcriptionist must also know the complex medical terminologies. this is the only way to provide top quality transcription services.

The transcript is sent back to the medical practitioner for examination after is been completed and any flagged comments are reviewed to make sure the report is completely accurate. In case the practitioner can not review the document, it gets signatured “dictated but not read”.

Medical Transcription

Medical transcription is a health care field’s profession and sometimes simply known as MT. The process involves the transcriptionist converting the recordings or dictations, made by health care professionals, into text format which are then added to the patient’s medical file. For a person to work as professional medical transcriptionist, he/she has to go through medical training which takes eighteen to twenty four months to complete and includes mastering medical terminologies, using transcription devices and typing skills.

Only people with a technical certificate or an associate’s degree are acceptable to work as a medical transcriptionist. A person with at least one year of experience in the field is often preferred because he/she has the ability to identify mistakes and also how to include correct information in the patient’s file. This improves the doctor’s efficiency because the chances of patients receiving harmful treatments are reduced.

The average pay for an on site medical transcriptionist in hospitals is eight to ten dollars an hour. According to research, about 36 percent of employed medical transcriptionists work on site with hospitals, another 23 percent work with doctors in their private offices and about 41 percent work independently allowing them to work easily from home.