Have you ever accidentally sent e-mail to the wrong address and had it bounce back as undeliverable. Or even worse it just gets lost and somebody else gets it? Well, it not only inconvenient for personal mail, but for MP3 to text transcription files it could be a cause for government action! So we recommend all sensitive files be encrypted.

Here are details of privacy portion of the The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA is a law to provide portability of health plans and privacy for medical patients.. While one can debate the merits of HIPAA, the regulations will be strictly enforced beginning April 12, 2003. In any instance, you need to prepare for increased security so that you won’t be subject to huge fines, litigation and imprisonment. To quote from the official website –

"Failure to comply with HIPAA regulations may result in fines and/or imprisonment. Fines may be assessed from $100 per person per violation and not more than $25,000 per person for violations of a single standard for a calendar year.

Knowingly using Protected Health Information (PHI) or a unique health identifier (ID) and/or disclosing Individually Identifiable Health Information (IIHI) outside the scope of the HIPAA regulations, could lead to fines up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to ten years."

Although we don’t offer consulting services on the HIPAA regulations you may go to any of these links to obtain concise, detailed information and protect your organization. Here is an example of what the public is reading about HIPAA and why you should be concerned.

We specialize in increasing the security of your medical transcriptions and substantially reducing your annual cost.

At the moment, here is how your business probably obtains MP3 to text transcription –

Your physicians use expensive mechanical micro cassette recorders subject to failure, or transcribe into a voice mail system either within or external to your organization. They record the patient’s name and id number and details of the examination.

These tapes are manually collected and stored pending the arrival of a courier who takes your tapes to the MP3 to text transcription service, the transcribed via anonymous voice-mail access to your recorded sessions. The service transcribes the tapes, using whatever format you like, audits them for quality, accuracy and spelling (if you pay for that) and returns them a day or two later with the micro cassettes if provided..

Your doctors audit the documents after you print them and you recycle the tapes.

Each billing period you receive a bill for between 13-16 cents a line. If each physician generates 25 lines per page and sees a hundred patients a day your cost is between $325 and $400 a month. If you multiply that by five physicians in a typical practice you are paying as much as $48,000 a year!

Here are your three problems –

1. You almost certainly recycle your tapes, or if you don’t they aren’t well indexed for easy retrieval.

2. If you are sued, the plaintiff’s lawyer will probably claim that the transcriptions are not accurate and you probably won’t be able to disprove that. Even if your MP3 to text transcription service claims to keep each Word document, they may not have the key file or be able to find it when you’re under attack. And last by not least.

3. You are paying too much.