Medical-legal transcription: your questions answered
Medical-legal transcription turns a physician's dictation about an evaluation into the finished report a claim, carrier or court will rely on. It covers IME, QME, AME, peer review, record review and impairment reports, and differs from general medical transcription because the output must follow a jurisdiction's report structure and preserve causation, apportionment and impairment language word for word.
Medical-legal transcription questions
Short, direct answers. The deeper explanation lives in the guide linked above.
What is medical-legal transcription?
It is transcription of dictation produced for a legal or claims decision rather than for treatment: independent examinations, agreed and qualified evaluations, peer reviews, record reviews and impairment ratings. The finished document is evidence, so formatting, terminology and figures are held to the requesting jurisdiction's expectations.
How is it different from general transcription?
General medical transcription documents care. Medical-legal transcription documents an opinion that will be argued over. That means state-specific report structure, exact retention of causation and apportionment wording, record citations kept intact, and uncertain figures flagged for the physician instead of smoothed over.
What report types do you transcribe?
IME, QME, AME, peer review, psychiatric, orthopedic and neurological evaluation reports, record reviews, narrative summaries, impairment ratings and addenda, plus state forms such as California PR-4, New York IME-4 and IME-5, Florida Expert Medical Advisor reports and Ohio BWC examination reports.
What does medical-legal transcription cost?
We quote per office rather than publishing a single rate, because volume, audio quality, template complexity and turnaround all change the work involved. Send one file and we will return a quote alongside the finished transcript so you can judge both together.
How fast is turnaround?
24 hours as standard and 18 hours on the STAT track. Long record-review dictations can take longer, and we confirm the actual return time when we hear the audio rather than quoting a figure blindly.
How is dictation kept secure?
Files are transferred and stored encrypted, each access is recorded per file, transcriptionists work under signed non-disclosure agreements, and business associate agreements are available on request. We do not claim a certification we do not hold — our security page sets out exactly what we do and do not claim.
Which states do you work across?
We work with evaluators and evaluation companies in California, Ohio, Florida and New York most often, and keep a separate template and terminology set for each system. We are a transcription provider, not a physician network, so we work wherever your evaluators practise.
Can you handle poor-quality dictation?
Usually yes: noisy rooms, speakerphone recordings and accented dictation are routine. Where a passage is genuinely unclear, we flag it with the timestamp for the physician to confirm rather than inserting a guess into a legal document.
How do I start?
Send one dictation with your report template. You will get back the finished report formatted your way, with a quote, and no contract or minimum volume attached.