"TROTTS"
There is no way of getting around it, turn around times (TAT) are important to MTs, the QA staff, their service owners and clients. My first TATs were for what now seems like an amazingly long time of 24 hours from the moment a dictation was assigned to me until its return to my MTSO. Her TATs to the clients, often 48 and 72 hours, are now the equivalent of urban legends in the world of "real-time dictation" for acute care. Client expectations today for document return are fueled in part by glib software salesmen and the corporate chain of command at large institutions that rarely allows scope for the concept of realistic (i.e., physically/mentally possible) TAT for transcription return. Now I receive my full allotment of work at 6 o'clock in the morning if the work all comes back from the MTs as it is scheduled to do. The TAT for return to the MTSO/client is 10 o'clock that same morning. If return of work is running late and I don't get it until 7, 8, 9 o'clock the TAT is still exactly the same, 10 o'clock in the morning ... 4 hours for consults and op notes. H&Ps are a bit longer and the discharge summary gets the benefit of a full 12 hours and is almost always the report that the client is calling for as a stat demanding immediate return! Even when I am doing straight transcription the TAT is still same-day return, no more of that 24 hours, clear it, set it aside and go back later to proof it when the words are fresh that many of us learned to do long, long ago in school. Today, in the acute care work I see, there is little wiggle room for word research or even the inevitable slow down in production that comes with a problem dictator of any sort.
I read with interest that there was a move toward standardizing TAT throughout the industry, an effort to get clients (especially the larger ones like my service works with) to understand that no matter how much technology can help speed the process up eventually it runs up against that same big brick wall that ever-shrinking TAT and ever-lower payment for lines returned has created. An MTSO I know well is fond of saying "turn around, quality and price, you get to pick 2 out of 3, but you can't have them all. " In my world of acute care transcription all too often the number one pick from the client is TAT. All else trails along behind in importance no matter how much folks hear about "quality first" in advertising slogans.
The "TROTTS Initiative" ... maybe the title was picked for its shock value, to attract attention, certainly management of production-related details of medical transcription has a distressing tendency to make many eyes glaze over. Maybe the folks doing the naming did a simple Google search (as I did) for the word "trots" and were completely overwhelmed by the learning there are
72 possible causes of "trots." It is amazing what simply dropping one "t" can do to shatter the respectability of a sound-alike word isn't it?
Maybe the MTs assigned to it were otherwise "occupied" the day the MTIA/AHIMA task force wrote this white paper on "Turn Around Times for Common Document Types (TAT4CDT). Obviously no one thought to point out that in the medical world (or even
the normal English language world) the word "trots" does not exactly have pleasant connotations. Maybe it was some sort of subliminal message for MTs, a subtle underlining of exactly where they rank in the esteem of their MTIA/AHIMA counterparts .
In any case, ever since I read those 2 articles dealing with TROTTS in the June 2008 issue of "Health Data Matrix" (the business and technology journal of AHDI and MTIA) I keep finding myself wondering how anyone working in health care, at any level, who expect clients and medical transcription services to take them seriously and to consider adopting these recommended TATs for return of the transcribed document, would name the task force dealing with that issue after a distressingly common and rather messy gastrointestinal ailment.
(I would link to these articles so folks could learn what the recommended TATs from these groups are and why, but so far I have been unable to find information about TROTTS on any of the Web sites for the 3 organizations involved, and, unfortunately, the magazine these 2 articles are in is only available to the members of the 2 smaller groups. Given that the point of this initiative is said to be that of convincing nonmembers ... that would be the majority of working MTs/MTSOs and health care institutions ... to actually use these TATs, perhaps someone from one of those groups will come along and let folks know where they can learn more about TROTTS).