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6.22.2007        VIVA TRANSCRIPTION GETS A MAKEOVER (Audio Feed)                    

 

MN1.com Interview Transcript

Rich Hancock:              Joining us in this segment of the program from VIVA Transcription, they’re a private company, is Manuel Prado.  Good afternoon, sir.

 

Manuel Prado:              Good afternoon, Rich.  Thanks for having me.

 

Rich Hancock:              Pleasure, pleasure to have you on board.  Tell us a little bit about VIVA Transcription, what the company does.  Of course the website is vivatranscription.com.  Tell us about the company.

 

Manuel Prado:              VIVATranscription.com provides medical transcription services to doctors and medical officers across the United States.  What that means is we take the dictation from medical providers and type that up and make it available to them on an online database system where they can then access their information on a 24-hour basis.  The application actually provides them with the capability to do faxing of the documents to other doctor’s offices.  They can do full text searches.  There are a bunch of bells and whistles in there that essentially facilitate the life of the doctor or the office manager.

 

Rich Hancock:              Now this is a major part of the changing face of our medical system.  The reality is that you go to your primary care physician for certain things.  They look you over and decide well may be you have to go and see a specialist about this particular, well you know, malady and you have to be able to get all of your accurate medical data from one place to another effectively and efficiently.

 

Rich Hancock:              Is that essentially what you do?

 

Manuel Prado:              That’s exactly it, Rich.  What we’re seeing in the medical industry is a migration from a paper-based organization to a paperless entity and as doctors’ offices migrate, they find that they do need to work with a company, like VIVA Transcription, that can help them not just with their transcription, but also in providing an online storage place for all their medical records.  One of the nice things about our service is that we provide infinite storage to these clients.

 

Rich Hancock:              Uh-hmm.  Now it’s also important tot keep all these information regularly updated, is it not?  I mean, frankly and especially if you’re dealing with an older patient who may have certain situations developing that have to be monitored, you know the patient’s condition may not be the same in January as it is in June.  So I imagine keeping that information updated is a big part of what you do.

 

Manuel Prado:              Absolutely.  And that’s something that is facilitated greatly when you’re dealing with an online system as opposed to paper-based.

 

Rich Hancock:              Is anybody really using?  Now, I mean, I know they’re using paper to some extent in-house in office.  I mean we all see that wall of charts and stuff when we go into our doctor’s office.  But isn’t it all really transforming with the advent of all this computer technology, turning more into a web or electronic-based system than a paper-based?

 

Manuel Prado:              Certainly.  The entire industry at this point is really making a very rapid move towards a more efficient, more paperless, and a system that really is very user friendly.  There is a great deal of technology out there today Rich…

 

Rich Hancock:              Uh-hmm.

 

Manuel Prado:              …that while very impressive, is extremely challenging to ever learn how to use.

 

Manuel Prado:             One of our biggest challenges as a company is making sure that whatever technology we come out with is very intuitive.  It is something that somebody can learn how to use in less than 5 minutes.  If it doesn’t pass that aspect test, then we’re not interested in implementing it. 

 

Rich Hancock:              Oh, really.  Well that kind of leads me into another aspect of this, in that you’ve got to rely on the staff in a physician’s office to be able to easily and efficiency use the system.  Are a lot of software upgrades required with respect to VIVA Transcription systems?

 

Manuel Prado:              That’s a great question, Rich, and really what you see in the medical field today is there is an increasing demand for training of individuals.  That people don’t need to be just talented at providing medical care, but more and more of the cases being that we’re asking these individuals to be very skilled with computers.  So, you’re really asking for a great deal there.  What we’re trying to do as a company is allow those people to focus on what they’re good at, providing health care.

 

Rich Hancock:              Well, just…

 

Manuel Prado:             We try to make the portion of medical records as simple as possible so that anybody that knows how to check e-mail can use our system.          

 

Rich Hancock:              Well, that’s gotta be a huge part of keeping down the cost in fact of providing care for the physician.  The less he has to worry about spending on the in-house infrastructure of his practice, the more he can save his patients in terms of providing their quality care.  

 

Manuel Prado:              Absolutely and I think keeping things simple, if you will, has a great deal to do with the success that we have here.

 

Rich Hancock:              Well, what about billing, we’re talking about the transcription of records with respect to those other operations of the office including billing and appointment notification, things like that, are VIVA Transcription Services available in that area at all?

 

Manuel Prado:              We currently do not offer those services Rich and the reason being that we found that the medical transcription market is really very large.

 

Rich Hancock:              Uh-hmm.

 

Manuel Prado:              And we are certainly tempted to offer coding services, billing, or any of the other that you mentioned there, but what we found is that when we remained laser focused on medical transcription, we’re having the best results, so we’re gonna continue on that path right now.

 

Rich Hancock:              Well obviously, it’s a monumental task to, when we look the, just the sheer volume of records that the doctors have to deal with everyday in terms of, you know, conducting their practice, the medical transcription aspect of it is huge; and again I don’t wanna get back to the aspect of having to transfer this information between physicians.  Is there any difficulty in terms of dealing with, you know, you’ve got a practice that is working with VIVA Transcription software and you have to say send to a specialist who may be is not, I mean, how much computer capability does the other physician have to have for the synergy to exist?

 

Manuel Prado:              So, the first important distinction here is that we do not offer software.

 

Rich Hancock:              Okay.

 

Manuel Prado:              Our application is available online.

 

Rich Hancock:              Oh, I see, so it doesn’t have to be installed through the physician’s office.

 

Manuel Prado:              That’s exactly right.

 

Rich Hancock:              Oh wow! That is great.

 

Manuel Prado:              The different doctors that’s working from home one day or is working from his vacation home, what have you, and that individual can access the medical records from wherever he or she has internet access.

 

Rich Hancock:              Well, that leads me to another important aspect of the computer world in which we live today and that is, protection of these records.  Now, obviously, certain people have to have maladies or difficulties that they don’t want anybody to say, hack in to their doctor’s systems and just, you know, simply find out about, just anything, anything as embarrassing or as simple as a wart, you don’t want somebody else to find out about it.  How important is securing the doctor’s access to the systems and the, you know, in transition to the say, another doctor, that security.  Is that, well, how have you implemented those programs?

 

Manuel Prado:              We’ve spent a great deal of time, energy, and money on security.  And, I think you’ll find that out of all of the security risks that exists out there; really having that information online is one of the most secure ways of having it.  The reason for that being that when somebody accesses a medical transcript online with our systems, you can actually track that.  You know who’s been in the system.

 

Rich Hancock:              Uh-huh.

 

Manuel Prado:              If you have a paper-based system, you really don’t.  Anybody can get in there and you’re never the wiser for it.

 

Rich Hancock:              Oh, exactly, the paper trail, as you say, you may never know who took that piece of paper whereas if somebody tries to access a system or hack into a system, you can track back to the hacker.

 

Manuel Prado:              Exactly.

 

Rich Hancock:              Well.

 

Manuel Prado:              And there are a great deal of measures that you can take.  We’ve certainly implemented a great amount of them.  You’ll see on our website that we’re certified by GeoTrust

 

Rich Hancock:              Uh-hmm.

 

Manuel Prado:              …to make sure that nobody ever has the capability to get into our systems.

 

Rich Hancock:              Well, the web site is vivatranscription.com and Manuel Prado is the CEO of the company.  Manuel, thank you so much for this has been very informative.  I appreciate it.

 

Manuel Prado:              Thank you, Rich, I appreciate your time.

 

Rich Hancock:              Look forward to talking to you again, sir.

 

Manuel Prado:              Likewise.

 

Rich Hancock:              Thanks a bunch.  That’s gonna do it for this segment.