Medical Transcription Certification

Medical Transcription Certification is a process by which it is determined that a candidate with the skills needed to fulfill job expectations is really capable of doing the job as part of the “health care team” in patient services.
AAMT provides CMT certification. You can read all about it at that site. http://www.ahdionline.org. Meditec is a long-time supporter of the need for standardization in the industry. Rules relating to how much latitude an MT has to fix things that are incorrect, use appropriate and clearly understood abbreviations, flag questionable information are all important in the MT responsibility standards.
The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), formerly the American Association for Medical Transcription, is the world’s largest professional society representing the clinical documentation sector whose purpose is to set and uphold standards for education and practice in the field of health data capture and documentation that ensure the highest level of accuracy, privacy, and security for the U.S. healthcare system in order to protect public health, increase patient safety, and improve quality of care for healthcare consumers. AHDI works to advocate for workforce development and credentialing in allied health and the critical role of the technology-enabled documentation knowledge worker in the electronic health record (EHR).

Medical Transcription Certification

Medical transcription involves a highly interpretive ability with language including grammar since the medical transcriptionist essentially work with providers (dictators) and ultimately set up the true patient medical record. The record obviously must be created to provide the most accurate reflection of a patient care process. MTs must know an awful lot about medicine, including the complicated and huge medical language itself, plus diagnostic medicine, anatomy and physiology, clinical medicine, operative terminology, lab and x0ray, pharmacology, the whole spectrum of medical knowledge from the diagnostic standpoint to every treatment protocol.
Medical transcriptionists require significant training to master the skills required to do the work. The medical information delivered to the chart via the transcriptionist has a huge role in the issues of quality care. The legal ramifications for incorrect transcription are significant. That means that the individuals who bring their talent to the job of MT must be well trained. The MT must be sufficiently skills to identify errors or inconsistencies in the provider dictation process and bring them to the attention of the provider. This is a serious “guardian” responsibility for the MT. Providers (and reviewers) rely on MTs to interpret and record as accurately as possible the dictated medical record.
The only way to ensure that an industry candidate may be entrusted with that very significant role as a member of the health care team is to provide benchmarks and standardization processes for knowledge, testing and certification. AHDI is the foremost organization dedicated to that process.

Reference: http://www.meditec.com/
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What is Medical Coding

Medical Coding is all about determining what services are provided and what the charge for the service is hooked to the service. Every healthcare provider that delivers a service receives money for these services by filing a claim with the patient's health insurance provider or managed care organization. This is also referred to as an encounter. An encounter is defined as "a face-to-face contact between a health care professional and an eligible beneficiary."

Medical Coding

Codes exist for all types of encounters, services, tests, treatments, and procedures provided in a medical office, clinic, or hospital. Even patient complaints such as headache, upset stomach, etc., have codes which consist of a set of numbers and combinations of sets of numbers. The combination of these codes tells the payer (health insurance companies or government entities) what was wrong with the patient and what services were performed. This makes it easier to handle these claims and to identify the provider on a predetermined basis. In addition, the services rendered (CPT) codes have to match the diagnosis (ICD) codes to justify medical necessity.
To do this correctly for each third party payer choices have to be made from a combination of 3 coding systems totaling over 10000 codes, and which change annually. In addition, a completely new coding system, ICD-10, is proposed for reimbursement purposes in the near future.