When your medical transcriptionist makes $350 a month in India

[jsr]

http://blog.al.com/live/2012/12/fatal_outsourcing_thomas_hospi.html

Fatal outsourcing? Thomas Hospital hit with $140 million verdict in death of Daphne woman
By Brendan Kirby

BAY MINETTE, Alabama – The family of a Daphne woman who received a lethal dose of medicine due to an error made by workers in India hired to save money on the preparation of medical records has won a $140 million judgment.

The verdict, handed down this week in Baldwin County Circuit Court, holds Thomas Hospital and three other firms responsible for the 2008 death of Sharron Juno. It may be the richest civil verdict in the history of Baldwin County, renowned for its conservative juries.

George “Skip” Finkbohner, an attorney who represented Juno’s son, attributed the large jury award to the facts of the case.

“They’re just really egregious,” he said. ...

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I'm a medical transcriptionist.

The jobs dried up about 10 years ago. I was trained in a medical office with two cardiologists. Office visits, x-ray reports, lab reports, medications, etc. Latin and Greek. Expert at medical dictionaries.

The "luxury" that homeland transcriptionists have is we can contact the dictating doctors and ask for clarification when they put something in a report that doesn't make sense like a dosage that doesn't apply to a particular pharmaceutical, etc. We are the lifeline for both the doctor and the patient.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. And I thought the docs were to sign off on the transcribed report,

indicating they read it.
At least that was the way it was back in the 1990's at my clinic.

[fasttense]

4. Seems a nurse wrote it up to make it look like the doctor had issued it.

"So she (the nurse) used the discharge summary (the original form was not available) prepared in India and wrote the medication information onto the physician admission order containing the doctor’s signature. It made it appear as if the doctor had confirmed the information about the medication when he had not, Finkbohner said."

But you know what? A corporation and a hospital saved money by outsourcing to an India woman making $4,000 a year, so it's a win-win for them.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Oh god....more than one problem exposed then.

It sounds as if the physician admisson order was perhaps pre-signed, leaving it to the nurse to fill in..HUGE no-no just a decade or so back when I was working, and for this very reason.
Lawsuit sure was valid.


We were always told to treat the ciient record as if it would be read in court someday.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. P.S. How stringent was the standard of typing anything medical?

If you made a typo or a mistake, you were forbidden from using White-Out. Why? Because it indicated that the records had been altered.

[Skittles]

3. the mistakes I see Indians making over and over and over

make me want to tear my hair out but at least they don't kill anyone. I'll say it again: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. Long before outsourcing was a known concept

one clinic where I worked apparently settled for local but questionable transcibers.
The patient info. was dictated into a tape recorder, the tape was sent to a business offsite but in the city, and the transcribed pages arrived back at the clinic for the doc signature.
This being in the south, accents played a large part into any errors.

My favorite goof was when it was discovered, on a page neatly typed, and signed off on by the dr.
that a patient had developed "gang green" of a limb.

Sort of poetically correct, I thought.