Why Certification is Important to Health Care

Why is Certification Important to Health Care?

Healthcare documentation involves a highly interpretive skill set, where medical language specialists partner with providers to create an accurate reflection of a patient care encounter. It requires a foundational understanding of the diagnostic process, clinical medicine, treatment, and care to be interpreted accurately and applied within the context of complex narrative dictation that is often very difficult to understand. Dictation challenges continue to be an ongoing problem for the transcription sector and demand that healthcare documentation specialists bring a strong interpretive skill set to the process. 

Healthcare documentation specialists cannot bring that interpretive skill set to the table without a significant foundation of knowledge and training. The pace at which healthcare delivery is moving does not provide a space for on-the-job training or mentoring. Such an unregulated training scenario creates unpredictable and dangerous gaps of knowledge that impacts the interpretive process and limits the ability of the healthcare documentation specialist to identify errors and inconsistencies in the dictated narrative – a role that is critical in the continuum of deployed risk management. Flagging inconsistencies and discrepancies in the health record is the guardian role of the healthcare documentation specialist, and providers rely on the keen eyes, ears, and interpretive mind of the workforce to ensure that health data is captured and recorded accurately, that inconsistencies are addressed, and that the amended record is authenticated by the provider.

The only way to ensure that a candidate can be entrusted with that role is to hold our workforce accountable to a defined scope of practice through benchmark testing and certification.