You need familiarity with medical practices, terms and documentation rules to edit medical reports.
Medical transcriptionists transcribe oral recordings into health-related reports, consultations, summaries and like data. Transcribed reports must be in accordance with all guidelines concerning health-care documentation practices. The key to editing medical reports by transcriptionists is to make sure that there are no errors or inconsistencies in the document's information and overall format.
Instructions
1. Identify the specific type of report you're editing. For example, is it an operative report, a correspondence report, a physical exam consultation, clinical notes, a discharge summary, or another type of document?
2. Proofread the document to check for any grammatical and style errors. Check the spelling, sentence structure, usage of punctuation (including ampersands, commas and virgules), homonyms, plurals, possessives, capitalizations and use of initials and acronyms.
3. Make sure the report's spacing is accurate when it comes to the punctuation marks. There are no spaces after a period with an abbreviation or a period used as a decimal point; before or after a hyphen, dash, slash, apostrophe, ampersands in abbreviations, or commas used within numbers; between parentheses and the enclosed material; between quotation marks and the quoted material; and between a number and a percent sign. Use one space between words and following commas, closed parentheses and semicolons. Use two spaces after punctuation at the end of a sentence and after a colon.
4. Verify that all symbols, abbreviations, eponyms, acronyms, and medical terms are documented accurately.
5. Ensure that all numbers in the document adhere to standard transcription guidelines. This includes dates, decimals, percentages and fractions. Remember, numerical digits are to be used alongside symbols and to indicate a patient's age. (The numbers are not to be spelled out.)
Tags: material between, medical reports, spaces after
