MT India Newsletter - to subscribe, send an email to:
MTIndia-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Jul 16, 2005

********************************************************

Outsourcing flops blamed on tunnel vision

********************************************************
Dear Friends,

Excerpts from a new research from analyst house Gartner.

<Hidden costs, high staff turnover and poor cross-cultural
communications are the key causes of offshore outsourcing failures,
according to new research from analyst house Gartner. The analyst
report predicts global spending on offshore outsourcing services
will top $50 billion by 2007 but it warns too many companies are
rushing into deals on the promise of unrealistic cost savings.

The biggest mistake that is common to all offshore outsourcing
failures is to base the business case solely on reduced labor
costs.

"Many hidden costs--including expenses associated with
infrastructure, due diligence, communications, governance, overseas
travel and cultural training--will offset the cost advantage of
wage differentiation," the report said.

Organizations are also warned that a disproportionate amount of
costs are incurred during the planning and start-up stages and that
any savings will take longer to materialize.

The high turnover of offshore staff, particularly in countries such
as India, also has a negative impact on productivity. "Such
turnover contributes to productivity loss because new staff must be
trained and overcome the learning curve for dealing with customer
applications and relationships," said Gartner.

Poor communication between the onsite and offshore project teams as
well as between management and employees is also picked out by
Gartner as a critical failure factor.>

To read the entire article:
http://msn.com.com/2100-9589_22-5757832.html?part=msn&subj=ns_5757832&tag=tg_itd\
c

Ciao!

Maj (Dr) Amit Chatterjee, SM
Strategist / Founder ~ mailto:amit@...
MT India ~ www.mtindia.org
"The Community of MT Professionals"

********************************************************
ADVERTISEMENT:
****************
Trainers wanted
++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT is looking for full time english and phoentic trainers,
medical doctors and experienced medical transcriptionists for our
training centers at Bangalore, Coimbatore and Hyderabad.

Contact: vimala@...
Phone: 0918051132600

********************************************************
NEWS AND VIEWS :
*****************
1) Many errors traced to physicians' sloppy speech: study

Doctors' poor handwriting is a well-recognized source of medical
errors, but their sometimes sloppy speech habits are a less
well-known contributor.

A study based on a sample of 220 dictated medical records totaling
9,726 lines of transcription found 27% of the 96 more-serious flaws
were attributed to the speaker, typically a physician, and not the
transcriptionist. Twenty of 38 critical flaws (53%) and six of 58
major flaws (10%) were traced to the speaker.

Critical flaws include patient misidentification, medical word
misuse and omitted dictation. Major flaws include misspellings and
inappropriate blanks. Minor flaws include punctuation, grammar and
formatting errors.

Judy Hinickle, owner of TransCom Corp., a Menomonee Falls,
Wis.-based medical transcription and consulting company, developed
the software program, QA Navigator, which scored the sample against
the Metrics for Measuring Quality in Medical Transcription, a set
of quality standards being developed by the American Association
for Medical Transcription, an industry trade group.

Physician-contributed dictation errors are an acknowledged problem
in the transcription industry. Part of the trouble arises when busy
doctors engage in multitasking, attempting dictation while doing
other things, such as eating.

"Transcriptionists call it chew and slurp," says Frank Lavelle,
president of medical transcription service organization MedQuist.
But it sometimes goes beyond a simple breach of etiquette.

"If you've ever received dictation coming from a surgeon driving
down the road in an open convertible eating an apple and dictating
a report for a procedure two weeks ago that he's just now getting
around to, that's hard," says David Woodrow, a division head of SPI
Technologies, also a medical transcription service organization.

AAMT Executive Director Peter Preziosi sent Hinickle's findings to
the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
with an eye to including transcription errors in its
sentinel-events reporting program.

Richard Croteau, M.D., executive director for patient-safety
initiatives for the JCAHO, says he was "somewhat surprised" the
results "did not show even more of the problems originating with
the" speaker.

Croteau says he supports standard-setting for transcription and
"continued monitoring of the accuracy of the voice-to-text
conversion process" to improve accuracy and reliability. While
there is no data on how often dictation or transcription problems
contribute to adverse patient outcomes, "I am persuaded they are a
significant factor," he says.

http://www.modernphysician.com/news.cms?newsId=3749

2) BPO all-rounder in Chandigarh

Three professionals from Chandigarh--Vijay Kumar, Harshvir Singh
and Sandeep Aggarwal--joined hands five years ago to start a
business in outsourcing information technology. They put their
money into a new venture Drish Infotech, which is doing software
development and IT-enabled services, and has later diversified into
medical transcription in 2001.

Today the company gets 99 per cent of its medical transcription
business from the US. Unlike call centres, the training period for
medical transcript is long, about one year--so it is difficult to
find people for this job, says Harshvir Singh, another director of
the company. Most of the young aspirants prefer to work in call
centres rather than as medical transcription professionals. Also,
the attrition rate is high.

The company does medical transcription for many hospitals in the
US. It now plans to have direct tie-ups with individual doctors in
that country. It has two merits-one, obviously the high returns,
and the other is that it is easier to get a dictation from the same
doctor everyday because the caller in India gets familiar with the
voice of the doctors. But it is expensive to explore the individual
doctors, he added.

The company has a tie-up with C Bay for manpower training. A team
of 50, Drish Infotech is optimistic of getting more business in the
ongoing recovery trend in the market.

http://www.business-standard.com/iceworld/storypage_link.php?chklogin=N&autono=1\
94122&lselect=2&leftnm=lmnu9&leftindx=9

3) MedQuist and AHIMA Partner to Measure Computerization in Coding

MedQuist Inc. and the American Health Information Management
Association's (AHIMA) Foundation of Research and Education (FORE)
announced a joint project to measure the adoption and utilization
of technology in coding. Using a hand-held, automated tool, AHIMA
members will participate in the survey during four regional
Excellence in Coding seminars to be held in North Carolina, Texas,
Minnesota and Florida. Members will also have a chance to take the
survey at AHIMA's Coding Community Meeting to be held in San Diego,
on October 15 and 16, 2005.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050712/phtu027.html?.v=15

4) 'Skill-Mapping' Program

The IT Professional Forum (ITPF), Chennai, has launched a
'skill-mapping' program.

Those applying for this program will be evaluated individually for
language proficiency, communication, documentation, leadership/time
management, team-building and several other parameters. The most
interesting part is that the entire evaluation process will be
entirely videographed and recorded in a CD.

A copy of this CD will be handed over to the aspirants to know
where they stand with regard to the industry. The ITPF will retain
a copy of the CD and forward it to the ITES companies, which are in
constant requirement of employees because of the high attrition
rate.

Based on this evaluation, the candidates would also be advised on
what stream of the enabled services industry they can join viz
finance, health, insurance, medical transcription, etc.

http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IET20050711022057&Page=T&Title=South\
ern+News+-+Tamil+Nadu&Topic=0

5) 10-day Internet crisis, $15 million losses: IT and telecom
operators demand compensation in Pakistan

Leading information technology (IT) and telecom associations on
Monday claimed that they suffered over $15 million losses because
of a 10-day Internet breakdown in the country.

In the IT industry that includes call centres, software companies
and medical transcription centres, there are around 30,000 people
employed with average salary of Rs 6,000 per month. The
productivity of those workers is three times than their salaries.
The productivity revenue stands at Rs 540 million per month. During
the crisis it came down to Rs 216 million. The representatives said
it was ironic that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA)
was silent on the situation as according to the Telecom Act of
1996, it was the responsibility of the PTA to ensure the quality of
telecom services to the consumers.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_12-7-2005_pg7_41
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
P. S. Would you like to share this newsletter with your friends
or post it on your site? Please do! But also be sure to read
below:

All original content of this newsletter is © Copyright 1998-2005
Mediweb Infotech Pvt. Ltd. All cited articles are copyright of
their authors and/or respective publications. Please feel free to
share this newsletter with your friends or post it on your site
as long as it is left intact with all links unchanged and this
notice.

Thank you for your interest in MT India!

The MTIndia Team
----------------------------------------------------------------
Please DO NOT reply to this mail id to unsubscribe