Webmedx Strengthens Quality Program and Improves Patient Safety in Compliance with New Industry Standards for Clinical Documentation

ATLANTA, Sept. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Webmedx, the third largest medical transcription service provider in the U.S. and a premier supplier of speech recognition and quality analytics technology, reinforced their commitment to quality and patient safety by announcing important changes to their quality assurance processes and procedures for transcribed and speech-generated reports. The new changes bring Webmedx into full compliance with the Healthcare Documentation Quality Assessment and Management Best Practices standard newly released by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), and the Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA). The announcement was made by Susan Lucci, RHIT, CMT, AHDI-F, Vice President of Field Operations, Webmedx. Lucci was instrumental in the development of the Best Practices standard and a major contributor throughout the project.

Webmedx quality results are consistently the highest in the industry. The company reports a 99.5% accuracy score for all patient reports it generates through its Enterprise5™ medical dictation and transcription solution and services team. In addition, Webmedx received the highest quality score ever for a medical transcription company in the 2009 Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Professionals Services Report (available at www.KLASresearch.com). "We attribute our success to the most skilled, knowledge work force in the industry," mentions Jay Cannon, President and COO, Webmedx. "In addition, we continually supplement our staffs' skills with advanced technology tools and business processes," he concludes.

"Accuracy in our patient reports is critical to all care delivery points and coding as well.  We are pleased to see QA Best Practices as a standard for quality and appreciate Webmedx's leadership in the process," agrees Heather Lingbloom, RHIA, HIM Operations Manager at Swedish Edmonds Hospital in Edmonds, Washington.

According to AHDI, 1.2 billion clinical records are produced in the United States every year and 60% of these are created using dictation and transcription. This equates to over 40 billion lines of transcription a year. "By implementing these new practices, we bring further clarity and improved quality to all aspects of clinical documentation; each individual encounter and the patient's entire medical history," mentions Lucci.

Based on the continuous quality improvement model and in accordance with new Best Practices, the company will adjust their quality program in three key areas:  

• Continuous, corrective action feedback loop for ongoing education for medical transcriptionists (MTs) and editors.
• Enhanced scoring methodologies to identify critical errors and ensure reports containing them do not pass quality review.
• New best practices for blanks, error grading and reporting.

Cannon notes that changes are already underway and the company will act quickly to integrate the new best practices into every step of document workflow. "By improving our quality process we will not only help reduce errors and positively impact patient safety, but also increase physician satisfaction by delivering a more consistent, high quality patient report," Lucci concludes.

About Webmedx

Webmedx, Inc. is the 3rd largest supplier of medical transcription services and clinical documentation technology for hospitals and clinics nationally. Recently named 2009 Best in KLAS for Outsourced Transcription according to the 2009 Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Professional Services report, December 2009, the company designs and implements customer-centric documentation solutions using the most credentialed domestic workforce in the industry and its own enterprise-class, intelligent speech recognition and clinical data mining technology platforms.  For more information, go to www.webmedx.com, email [email protected], or call 877-846-1200.

SOURCE Webmedx, Inc.