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Background

Ancient cave writings attest to the earliest forms of healthcare documentation. While the medium changed from metal plates to clay tablets, to hieroglyphs on temple walls, to papyrus, to parchment, to paper, and most recently to electronic files, the reasons for maintaining records have always been the same to record an individual’s health care and the achievements in medical science.

Until the twentieth century, physicians served as both providers of medical care and scribes for the medical community. After 1900, when standardization of medical data became critical to research, medical stenographers replaced physicians as scribes, taking their dictation in shorthand.

The advent of dictating equipment made it unnecessary for physician and scribe to work face-to-face, and the career of medical transcription began. As physicians came to rely on the judgment and reasoning of experienced medical transcriptionists to safeguard the accuracy and integrity of medical dictation, medical transcription evolved into a medical language specialty. Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, medical transcriptionists are using speech recognition technology to help them create even more documents in a shorter time. Medical transcription is one of the most sophisticated of the allied health professions, creating an important partnership between healthcare providers and those who document patient care.