Primary Sources and Further Reading

A deliberately short list. Everything here is a primary source that publishes material worth reading directly rather than in summary — including in summary on this site.

None of the organisations below is affiliated with this site, and none has reviewed or endorsed anything on it. They are listed because they are the authorities whose material governs or defines the subject.

Privacy and security

• HHS — HIPAA for Professionals. The starting point for the Privacy, Security and Breach Notification Rules, including Business Associate obligations. Read the rule text rather than a vendor's summary of it.
• HHS — Security Rule. The administrative, physical and technical safeguards that apply to any organisation handling electronic protected health information.
• HHS — Breach Notification Rule. Obligations, thresholds and timescales.
• NIST SP 800-66r2. A practical guide mapping the Security Rule onto concrete controls — the most useful single document for specifying transcription security requirements.
• HHS Office for Civil Rights breach portal. Reported breaches affecting 500 or more individuals. Instructive reading on what actually goes wrong, as opposed to what is feared.

Health information technology

• HealthIT.gov (ONC). Standards, interoperability and the documentation-burden programme.
• HL7 International. The exchange standards that carry transcribed documents into the record.

Professional practice and the workforce

• Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI). The professional body for healthcare documentation specialists; publisher of the RHDS and CHDS credentials and of the standard reference material on documentation quality.
• American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). Health information management practice, documentation integrity and the legal health record.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics — Medical Transcriptionists. The published occupational outlook, and the correct source for employment and earnings figures.

Clinical terminology

• National Library of Medicine. Terminology resources, including the drug and clinical vocabularies that underpin transcription reference lexicons.
• PubMed. For checking terminology and usage in the primary literature.

A note on the old links pages

This domain historically carried a large reciprocal-link directory spanning categories well outside its subject — travel, hotels, retail and personal finance among them. That was an ordinary search practice of the early 2000s and it is not reproduced here. Those addresses now redirect to this page, which is the closest honest equivalent.

Back to the reference index, or see the site map.