Transcriptionists can help a person transcribe everything from phone calls to important meetings to old podcast episodes, creating digital, searchable documents for them to reference at any point. Many businesses utilize transcriptionist freelancers or agencies to help them keep up, and the majority of businesses are able to rely on generalists. For some industries, however, finding specialized services are essential.
Those working in medical, legal, and law enforcement industries are perfect examples. Each has highly specific needs, esoteric language, a high level of description, and different types of specialized documents or reports that generalists wouldn’t be familiar with.
If a person on the fence, they should read this to see why specialized transcription services are so important for certain industries and niches.
They’ll Speak The Language … And Be More Accurate
An individual wouldn’t hire a native French speaker to translate a phone call that was conducted in Mandarin, and they definitely wouldn’t want someone whose medical experience hasn’t gone beyond a few episodes of Grey’s Anatomy to transcribe surgical notes.
A person wants someone who speaks their language, literally and metaphorically. The average generalist won’t be able to keep up with terms frequently used in law enforcement, legal, and medical fields, meaning that their work would come back slower and with more questions in the best case scenario. In the worst case scenario, the transcripts would come back riddled with errors.
When someone speaks a person’s language, they’ll get their content back quickly and accurately. At Transcription Outsourcing, all of our clients come to us for specialized services and our 99% accuracy rate; they can’t afford to take a chance on an anonymous, no-name company that may not even be using native English speakers. Specialized transcription services almost always indicate high accuracy, so look for these when looking around.
They Respect Privacy & Security
At Transcription Outsourcing, we have the necessary software and security measures needed to uphold the privacy standards for every industry that we offer specialized services in. This includes HIPAA-compliant regulations for the medical industry, because we understand the sensitive nature of the documents that we’re handling and give them the respect they deserve. The average transcriptionist or agency may not do the same, putting a customer, their office, and those they’re helping at risk.
If a company is hiring a new agency, ask about security measures if that’s important in their line of work. Do they use encryption, multiple-step verification, or certain software to keep content safe? They should be able to tell the customer what they’re doing to protect them and the work that they do.
They’ll Get the Format Right
Every unique business has different reports or documents that require particular, correct formats. A police interview transcript will need to be transcribed and organized differently than a business meeting or a patient appointment.
Specialized transcriptionists are trained to handle this and be familiar with a customer’s needs, allowing them to get started on the right foot and saving them a backlog of jumbled transcripts to sort through later. Imagine having an easy-to-follow phone call returned as a transcription that exists only as a large, unreadable, jumbled block of text. Trust me when I say that’s the last thing anyone wants, and that it prevents a person from getting the full value from their investment. It will also create more work for them once they have received the poorly formatted transcript, because they will have to do a lot of editing themself.
They’ll Be Ready to Hit the Ground Running
If a business is outsourcing work to an agency or a freelancer, one of the biggest perks is that they don’t have to actually train them like they would an employee. In order to really find someone who can hit the ground running, however, they need to find someone who has experience in the specific transcription services that they need.
When it comes to specialized transcription services, an initial set up call to ensure that both businesses are on the same page and that we’re doing things exactly according to preference is all that’s needed. Medical transcriptionists, for example, will understand the importance and difference between chart notes, operative notes, and progress and follow up notes. The person will get their transcripts back to them as if they’d done them alone, and it doesn’t get any better than that.
