WinScribe - the Answer to Medical Transcription Company’s Woes

When Neal Runions and Mary Lou Woodward started their medical transcription service in August 2004, they thought that their combined experience would be the ideal foundation for their new business venture. Neal’s background in the IT industry and Mary Lou’s experience as a Transcription Manager meant they were well placed to launch a successful medical transcription service. But overcoming the hurdles of finding a solution that did what it promised was something they hadn’t counted on.

The Challenge – Functionality and Flexibility at the Right Price

“As the Transcription Manager for a community hospital I was using a dictation system with a 6-figure price tag,” explains Mary Lou. “So when we went looking for a system, we went to the same distributor and purchased a solution designed for smaller businesses,” says Mary Lou. “What we discovered over time, however, is that the distributor didn’t know the product and that it couldn’t do what we were told it would do.” After 4 months of trying to get the system to work, Mary Lou and Neal sent it back and got their money refunded. “Then we found Executive Communication Solutions (ECS) on the Internet,” recalls Mary Lou. “Their sales person stayed late that evening to show us a demonstration of the WinScribe system and we were so impressed we placed an order the next day.”

The Solution – WinScribe

Vauxcom already had two clients generating 125 jobs per day when they migrated to the WinScribe system. The largest is a hospital that uses Vauxcom to handle its overflow.  “The hospital owns 12 practices which employ 39 physicians,” says Mary Lou. “We download their practice notes each day using the WinScribe Importer which allows our server to receive jobs from the hospital’s dictation server.” The second client consists of two physicians that dictate jobs to Vauxcom using WinScribe Telephone Dictation.

Vauxcom employs independent contractors throughout the U.S. to transcribe its dictation jobs. WinScribe Internet Typist allows them to download jobs via the Internet and the remote download time is virtually instantaneous so there aren’t any delays for the transcriptionist. “Another big benefit of WinScribe from a transcription point of view is that the licenses are for concurrent users,” says Mary Lou. “This allows us to have more transcriptionists than licenses as not all of our transcriptionists are working at the same time. Our previous system didn’t allow this – that was a big problem for us.”

Reporting and accountability were a big factor in the decision-making process. “In the U.S. there is a lot of legislation that we need to comply with to protect the privacy of a person’s healthcare information,” notes Mary Lou. “WinScribe provides us with the necessary security and accountability. All the data is encrypted when it is transferred from the hospital to Vauxcom and over the Internet to our transcriptionists. And the reports allow us to track who has accessed each job based on their login id.”

“We can also track every job coming in and going out of the system which is particularly important when we bid on government work,” says Neal. “We could see right from the start that WinScribe does what we want it to do and does it well. And the price was right!”

The Results – A Seamless Solution That Works

ECS did a top-notch job of project managing, installing and training Vauxcom on the WinScribe solution. “We didn’t skip a beat,” says Mary Lou. “ECS provided us with a loaner system until our WinScribe solution arrived and it was all completely seamless. Our clients didn’t even know our system had changed.” ECS also did some custom work for Vauxcom, creating a script that allows the file to be renamed using the demographics of the job and saving it in a specific file designated for the client.

The transcriptionists have been thrilled with the new system. One of Vauxcom’s trancriptionists recently sent Mary Lou an email praising the WinScribe solution: “I really love the WinScribe platform. I love how the drop-down menu features give you information about the job and automatically opens MS Word. The audio is very clear. Overall this is one of the best platforms I’ve used working in the transcription field for the past 16 years.”

 As for feedback from the doctors, no news is good news according to Mary Lou. “We’ve had no complaints from the telephone dictation users. They simply follow the prompts in the system, perform 1 to 5 minutes of dictation, close the job and go on to the next one. They don’t use a lot of the features available to them but this could change when we start to bid on large government jobs.”

“It is an excellent system,” sums up Mary Lou. “WinScribe compares very favorably with the expensive high-end systems I’ve used in hospitals. It has absolutely great functionality for the price. I would recommend it to anyone.”

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