Susan Lucci (AHDI’s President) recently appointed a National Board subcommittee to research future roles for MTs within the EHR. According to a Plexus article, entitled: MT Career Transitions, the goals of the committee were to “define roles, describe the necessary skills sets required for each role, define the educational requirements, visualize a career lattice for MTs, and publicize and market our findings.”

Here are some of the more common threads the committee has detected thus far:

1. Becoming credentialed as a CMT is more critical than ever to demonstrate medical language knowledge.
2. Coding knowledge is also expected to be much more critical to future roles in the EHR.
3. MTs will need more education of SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature for Medicine), ICD-10 and CPT (current procedural terminology) codes.
4. Transcriptionists will need additional technical skills, including familiarity with database management, basic Health Level Seven interface language and how to maneuver within the EHR.
5. Most new roles will require an associate’s degree, with many roles requiring a bachelor’s degree and beyond.
6. The location of where MTs perform transcription is also expected to change, as many MTs will transition back into the hospital setting.
7. Hospitals will need trainers to ensure quality control with medical documents, which opens up another job opportunity for MTs.
8. Roles for credentialed CMTs will be needed to transcribe, edit and review documentation from a variety of resources utilizing front-end speech, back-end speech and traditional audio-to-text conversion.
9. MTs could also have roles in an ambulatory setting, in which they will perform traditional audio-text narratives and may utilize speech recognition editing.