While discussing about unscrupulous characters, we discussed the issue of resort to unsolicited bulk mail for marketing. "For most of these fly-by-nighters, bulk e-mail (spamming) seems to have emerged as a favorite tool for marketing. I can tell you that this is a very poor technique for generating leads, as most people view unsolicited mail as an intrusion and generally do not even read it. In fact, I can personally remember at least half a dozen instances where I was sent marketing mail that had viruses attached!" said Mr Reddy. In addition, he added that the appalling grammar and awkward expression of these e-mails instantly obliterate any chance that the sender may have had of convincing the recipients to give him business.

We reviewed the future of Medical transcription, in the outsourcing context, with continuous speech recognition and formatted electronic records coming in use. "The future of medical transcription is bright. We follow continuous voice recognition developments very closely and we believe that a viable voice rec system for medicine is at least 10 years away. At the current level, voice rec is still at an 'interesting toy' stage, but I have no doubt that it will reach a reasonable level of reliability in the next few years." asserted Mr Mahidhar. He went on to say "When it does becomes more effective, then it is not a threat to the medical transcription industry, but an opportunity. The transcription industry can use this tool to 'pre-process' the data and then edit the document in order to bring it up to acceptable quality standards. Thus the MT's role changes - it moves away from typing to a more 'document completion and quality assurance' role. It's illogical for a hospital to install expensive voice rec systems and maintain them with an IT department, since a hospital's core competency is in treating patients and not in document preparation. So transcription would continue to be outsourced to transcription agencies that employ voice rec as a productivity tool. And given the vast volume of business, I do not see any threat of the employment figure diminishing."

We discussed the issue of defining some Industry standards regarding quality. "Virtually every company I have ever encountered claims to achieve 98%+ quality. And this from companies that have trained their MTs for just 2-3 months!" retorted Mr Mahidhar. "There is an AAMT standard, but this is more a recommendation than a standard. I believe that it would be good if we can define a universal standard, however, this is a task that should not be underestimated in its complexity. For example, we have to take into account the quality of the voice file (accent, speed of dictation) etc as these are also variables in the quality equation. Also there are issues like punctuation, which is to some degree subjective. Some of these subjective 'judgment call' issues have made the definition of a universally unambiguous standard quite a prickly issue."

We asked Mr Reddy for his perceptions whether the 'outsourcing to India' model would ever be a threat to MTs in US. "In an era of rapid globalization, we have to accept global competition as a 'given.' Whether it is cars from Japan, chips from Taiwan, garments from China, or software from the US, global competition is here to stay and countries have to develop specific skill clusters in order to compete with the rest of the world. Given the level at which outsourcing is growing (20%+) annually, I believe that there is enough business for all and eventually a 'steady-state' will emerge where all players are represented in the marketplace." was his considered opinion.

On confidentiality issues over the internet, Mr Mahidhar stressed that Indian companies need to deal with patient confidentiality issues in a pre-emptive manner. His advice is that they specifically need to:

 Design and enforce confidentiality compliance procedures and processes in the production center.

 Ensure that the hardware and networking set-up is secure and does not permit hacking or stealing of data.

 Have all personnel who have access to transcripts sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements.

And on this note, imbibing some cheer from CBay's mission and vision, we took our leave.


By our special editor,
Bangalore,
26 April 2000