The quality goals in medical transcription are difficult. You already know that. And they ought to be difficult. After all, it is medical transcription that creates medical records of patients. A careless mistake can even cause someone his/her life. So, as a medical transcriptionist, you have got to deliver very quality work.

How does the profession quantify this quality? Well, the overall quality goal is at least 98 percent. And when it comes to critical errors, it is 100 percent. Talking of errors, let’s look at the categories of medical transcription errors as defined by the Association of Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI). There are three types of errors: critical errors, major errors, and minor errors.

Critical errors are the ones that can impact the safety of a patient. This is the reason the profession has zero tolerance with respect to these errors. Examples of critical errors include 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.

Major errors are the ones that do not impact the safety of the patient but impact the integrity of the medical document. The medical transcriptionist has to ensure 98 percent accuracy with respect to these errors. Examples of 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.

Minor errors mark the areas of improvement in the medical document. They are a bit aesthetic in nature. Here again, the medical transcriptionist has to ensure 98 percent accuracy. Examples of minor errors include errors in punctuation and grammar, inconsistency of format, and typing errors not amounting to any change in the meaning of content.

Let me know if you have more questions about these errors.