History of Medical Transcription

Healthcare documentation existed at early age in ancient cave writings. The medium of writing changed from metal plates to clay tablets, temple walls, paper, and now to electronic files.

Until the 20th century, physicians had to play roles of both providers of medical care and scribes.  When standardization of medical data became critical to research, medical stenographers replaced physicians as scribes who used to take their dictations in shorthand.  With the advent of dictation equipment, physicians and scribe need not work face-to-face and the career of medical transcription was born.

Now in the 21st century, lots of hospitals, transcription companies, and some medical transcriptionists use speech recognition technology to transcribe the files.  In the coming future, speech recognition will be very common and everybody will be using it but still the need of medical transcriptionists will be there because a machine can never give you 100% accuracy in medical transcription.