eight london hospitals are outsourcing transcription to india, with comical, yet potentially worrisome results:
London, Aug. 19: Yet another fault has been found by British unions with the quality of outsourcing to India but this time perhaps with some justification.
Medical letters are being transcribed by secretaries in India but potentially life-threatening errors are creeping in because of insufficient knowledge of either the English language or of complicated terms, it was claimed yesterday.
It is also possible that the use of computer spell checkers is leading to some words being replaced by unlikely ones. In one example, the drug “Lansoprazole”, used to treat stomach ulcers, was transcribed as the popular holiday resort “Lanzarote”.
In another case, “phlebitis (vein inflammation) left leg” was changed to “flea bite his left leg”. And a “below knee amputation” was transcribed as “baloney amputation”. One note referred to a patient’s “cute angina” instead of “acute angina”. “Euston station tube malfunction” should have read “Eustachian tube malfunction”.
personally? i think most politicians should have their “baloney” amputated, but that’s just me. 😀
from The Telegraph.
Well, that is a funny (and sad, in a way) article.
As a side note, I think outsourcing and medicine is a very interesting area. Radiologists in India are reading images for American hospitals. My particular area of medicine, pathology, is not quite ready for this because the technology is not good enough to do it, but it will happen in a fashion someday. Which is why I think we should take the bull by the horns, as it were, and develop these technologies here in the US so that if routine pathology images are outsourced, we in the US can still serve as the ultimate ‘referral’ center and have things outsourced back to us.
Does that garbled passage make any sense?
Looks like clear spell check errors to me. For one thing, desi doctors (and that’s who does the transcription — doctors make more as transcribers for the first world than providers for the third) know more about “below knee” than “baloney”. I mean, have you ever seen Oscar Meyer in India?
The substitution of “Euston Station” for “Eustation” makes me think that it’s a british spellchecking dictionary at that.
You know how they train Indian doctors to handle US transcription, don’t you? They have them watch hundreds of hours of ER so that they can pick up American medical lingo and accents.