The medical transcription profession offers absolutely no scope for errors. Errors in medical records can cost dearly in the world of healthcare. The expected accuracy rate in medical transcription is above 98%. The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) has classified medical transcription errors in three categories. The association has also set quality goals for each type of errors. In today’s post, we will look at the error categories and the quality goals associated with them.

Type 1: Critical Errors

• Quality goal: 100 percent accuracy
• Description: As the qualifier suggests, critical errors are the ones that can impact the safety of a patient. The healthcare industry does not tolerate even a single critical error in a medical document. Medical transcriptionists cannot afford to let a critical error slip by.
• Examples: Incorrect patient information, incorrect names and doses of medicines, incorrect values in test results, incorrect test names, and missing a part of the recorded information amount to critical errors.

Type 2: Major Errors

• Quality goal: 98 percent accuracy
• Description: These errors do not impact the safety of the patient but impact the integrity of the medical document.
• Examples: Major errors include misspelling regular words and medical terms, incorrect inferences owing to incorrect verbiage, failure to comply with protocols and policies, failure to highlight any missing information, and intentional highlighting of information.

Type 3: Minor Errors

• Quality goal: 98 percent accuracy
• Description: These errors do not impact patient safety or document integrity. Minor errors are not factual errors; they are somewhat aesthetic in nature, marked by the areas of improvement in the medical document.
• Examples: Minor errors include errors in punctuation and grammar, inconsistency of format, and typing errors not amounting to any change in the meaning of content.

The high quality goals for the above-mentioned errors suggest that the medical transcription work requires specialized professionals who are highly dedicated in their work.