Overview: Psychology transcription services can be a tremendous time saver, but that’s not the only benefit. Psychologists, counselors, mental health workers, psychiatrists, and other related professions are constantly bogged down in admin tasks. Not only does that take away from their clinical hours actually seeing patients, but being saddled with an overwhelming amount of documentation can be a drain mentally and emotionally. This leads to issues from reduced work/life balance to frustration and burnout.
By outsourcing some or most of your documentation needs to a professional psychology transcription service, you can free up your clinical hours to see more patients and avoid working evenings and weekends updating patient or client records. How will you spend your extra time?
Too Many Psychologists Spending Too Much Time on Admin Tasks
Does this sound like you? A 2015 Survey of Psychology Health Service Providers by the American Psychology Association (APA) found that the average psychologist spent 7.4 hours with administrative tasks per week. In fact, that represented the second-highest time commitment behind direct patient care (18.4 hours/week). That means if each clinician was able to convert all their administrative hours to clinical hours, they could increase their patient caseload by over 40%.
Now, getting your admin hours down to zero might be a fun thought experiment, but it’s not realistic in the real world. Like most thought experiments, though, the proof of concept is there. Reducing even some of your admin hours so you can see more patients could add thousands of dollars to your bottom line over the course of a year. That’s worth trying for.
How Psychology Transcription Services Give You More Hours in the Day
A penny saved is a penny earned – and the same is true for time. If you can save even a fraction of those 7.4 hours in admin tasks, you’ll earn more time to focus on billable tasks instead. Audio transcription, like all clerical help, can give you a huge boost in productivity.
Psychology transcription services do that in two ways. First, if you are handwriting notes or typing into a laptop or tablet, just the simple act of dictation can save you a lot of time. Recording notes using a digital recorder or even your cellphone is the fastest method of recording notes for most clinicians. Second, trained transcriptionists take those audio files and convert them into clean text while you do other work. When your transcripts are ready – usually within 24 hours – you can download and review them before adding them to the patient/client record. That speeds up the time it takes you to generate reports and other documentation, including:
- SOAP notes
- Patient encounters, including psychological evaluations*
- Referral letters
- Mental health evaluations
- Progress reports
- Clinical interviews
- Notes from family or third-party discussions
- Any notes, evaluations, or reports you generate every day – including personal notes
These services are available to a wide range of psychologists and other mental health specialists, including:
- Clinical or research psychologist
- Mental health counselor
- Addictions counselor
- Marriage and family therapist
- Developmental psychologist
- School psychologist
- Forensic psychologist
- Clinical social worker
- Psychiatrists (including forensic psychiatrists)
- Any mental health professional who maintains records and/or writes reports
Psychology transcription services can streamline your time so you can work more efficiently, take on more clients, and relieve some of the stress of your day.
*Psychologists tend to generate more and longer reports than the average physician or health professional. That means psychology transcription services are particularly effective for psychologists and related professionals.
Other Ways Psychology Transcription Services Can Help
Time savings and the resulting ability to boost your number of billable hours is probably the biggest way psychology transcription services can help. But there are other advantages.
More Face-to-Face with Your Patient or Client. If your nose is buried in your reports as you’re talking with your client or if your eyes are glued to a computer screen, you are probably not getting a lot of face-to-face time with your client. You may not even notice – but they probably do. Psychology and related fields depend on that personal connection. You can improve your rapport and provide your patients with the attention they need by recording notes instead of writing or typing during sessions. You could also record whole sessions (with the patient’s permission) to refer to later.
Higher Job Satisfaction. Time and again, we hear how clinicians from across all medical fields get burned out not by their patients but by the administrative tasks. Of course, medical records are very important and need to be kept up to date. But if clerical help can take some of that off your plate so that you can focus more on your clients, wouldn’t that improve your professional satisfaction?
Better Work/Life Balance. Related to the above, many of the frustrations stem from the fact that clinicians have to spend time in the evening and on weekends to catch up with reports. So, not only are you cutting into clinical hours with admin work, you’re now cutting into personal and family time. Psychology transcription services shift the bulk of that work away from you for a better work/life balance.
Choosing the Right Psychology Transcription Service is Crucial
Of course, not all psychology transcription services are the same. Be careful of companies advertising suspiciously low rates because you could be fixing more grammar errors and filling in more blanks than it’s worth. For example, it’s frustrating to see spelling mistakes or blanks for common psychology terms such as “complementarity” and “perseverate” – not to mention other specialized terms and jargon. Like many services, you get what you pay for.
To complicate matters, the narrative is often more complex for mental health clients. Clinicians need more range to tell the patient’s story, requiring the nuances and breadth of storytelling that only narratives can provide. The longer your reports, the more you need a reliable transcription service to reduce the number of errors.
iMedat can help. With our decades of medical transcription experience including psychology transcription services, you’ll get the full-service you need without the headaches. Plus, we work to your workflows, customizing our services to meet the individual needs of every clinician in your office. Contact iMedat at 888-779-5888 or via our email form. We’ll get you set up and saving hours in no time.