Medical transcription firms go through rough patch

Chupsie Medina
INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines — If there is one business that has been relatively spared by the tripling of crude oil prices and the consequential runaway costs of almost all other commodities including rice and similar food grains, it is the medical transcription industry.

“People — and Americans are no exception — still get sick,” says Mila San Juan, managing director of Med Script (MS) Corp., a medical transcription company with its manpower operations center in the country, but with networking relationships in the US.

American doctors and medical care facilities continue to rely on medical transcription as an enabler of public health and safety, requiring patients’ health records to be digitized for easy referencing.

Unmindful of the economic crisis brought about by the multi-billion dollar credit collapse of its housing sector, the demand for medical transcription services in the US continues to grow at double digit pace, last estimated at 18 percent yearly.

With pressure to reduce costs and in view of an aging profile (and decreasing number) of Americans providing onshore medical transcription services, the growth of outsourcing in offshore service firms, particularly India and the Philippines, has gained even more popularity.

And yet, the Philippines does not seem to be taking advantage of the opportunity.

Med Script was founded four years ago on the assumption that Filipinos can compete and grow in such a fertile environment. “The demand is undoubtedly there,” says San Juan.

However, growing the business is a totally different ball game, and Med Script’s experience is no different from the many that had joined the industry hoping to cash in on the boom.

From the hundreds of companies that had been formed during the boom years of the early part of the decade, “only a handful have survived,” San Juan says. Many of those that did not make it were third-party subcontracting operations that operated less than 50 seats.

Being dependent on the industry’s big firms for jobs did not assure continuous cash flow that was necessary to cover the day-to-day operations. With also a smaller profit share on every line that is transcribed, many lasted just months.

“I had to go to the US to firm up contracts for medical transcription services,” she says. It was essential to Med Script’s survival, a business strategy that allowed the company to continue operating through the last couple of years and to plan on expanding and growing.

Securing the market though was just one part of the equation to stay afloat. The other part – and perhaps the trickier – was ensuring a 98-percent accuracy in the transcription service. “If we think that our relatively superior mastery of the English language compared to the Indians is an edge, we’re deluding ourselves,” San Juan says.

A former teacher, San Juan is aghast at the simple errors that Filipino medical transcription agents make. “I think it is no longer a question of simply learning the subject-verb drill; most of the time, it’s plain carelessness, a ‘pwede na’ attitude,” she says.

One attribute of a model medical transcription agent treasured in the industry is the ability and discipline to focus on details. Often, this is sacrificed by those relatively new for the need to deliver on time.

The task of making sure that mistakes are spotted and corrected therefore falls on the editor. This job, San Juan says, is clearly not yet something that a Filipino can fill in.

“We’re still maintaining US-trained medical transcription editors who go through the copy that our Filipinos produce,” she says. This has substantially added to the cost of operations. Good Filipino editors who are familiar with medical terminologies are hard to find, partly because the industry is still in its infancy.

India definitely has had a head start, having taken advantage of the need by American doctors of medical transcription services in the early 1990s.

The Medical Transcription Industry Association of the Philippines, Inc., a non-profit organization composed of some 30 firms, similarly acknowledges the need to hurdle the challenge posed by trained and experienced industry workers.

To triple the industry workforce from its 10,000-people strength, focus is being given by MTIAPI to developing related skills training and certification programs with the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority.

Meantime, San Juan says, Filipino-owned medical transcription companies are making just enough to cover operating costs. Once there are enough trained and capable Filipino transcription workers and editors, only then can the industry including Med Script look to staking a bigger slice of the global business.