You hear a lot about becoming a medical transcriptionist. Is it worth it, or is it a rip-off? How much does it typically cost? How much training is needed (timewise)? Do you earn a certificate? Also, do they help you make your contacts? Advise you on what to charge? Etc…
I have heard one hard task is understanding doctors’ accents. But, I have an “ear” for this, if one can have such a gift. So, what else should I know?
All input is greatly appreciated.
I’m a medical transcriptionist. Currently, I work part time at home, and my full time job is transcription quality assurance and education. It is worth it, if you have the aptitude for it.
I received my training through a program at the clinic where my full time job is, they covered my tuition and books and paid me hourly to take special accelerated classes at the local community college. A medical transcription certificate usually takes 2 years, my training took 12 weeks, and was quite intense. There are also courses you can take at home. Three of the major ones are M-TEC , Andrews, and Career Step. I’ve heard Andrews is good.
A lot of courses will claim that they will help you make contacts, or help you find a job, but I’ve heard that sometimes they really don’t. Also, just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean you have to be self employed, finding your own accounts, etc. There are national companies that hire transcriptionists to work from home, though it can be hard to find one that will hire someone with no experience. Most require 3-5 years, and for good reason. It can be a hard job when you’re first starting out, and having people around you to help you, to listen when you can’t make out a word, is important. I would strongly recommend, if you decide to pursue this, getting a job in house first until you get some experience under your belt.
I’m also a Medical Transcriptionist. I work in-house and would LOVE to work at home, but I don’t see that happening for a long while. As Mishell pointed out, most of the companies who employ from home want at least three years experience, and some want as much as ten to fifteen.
That’s really frustrating to me, but I do understand why. I’d never done transcription work before I got this job, and my employer’s idea of training is to throw you directly into work and just have the supervisors yell whenever you make too many mistakes. :rolleyes: Anyway, through this job I have found that I love transcription work and I’ve also found it’s a **lot ** harder than I thought it would be. Having QA people to “fill in the blanks” is a priceless benefit of working in-house, especially when dealing with thick accents and speed talkers.
I also have an ear for understanding people, but that talent is severely stretched when someone calls in with “patientpresentedwithrhabdomylosisacuterenalfailureandanoromaxillaryfracturecoughmumbleslurpsighring”. Toss a heavy accent on top of that and you find yourself ready to scream sometimes.
But it’s really great work, I swear! 
Seriously, I love it and wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I have to agree with Mishell – you’d do best to have an in-house job before trying to tackle working from home, even if you could find employment. I don’t have educational training (besides the various medically oriented classes I took while in LPN school), but it surely couldn’t hurt.
Feel free to ask any other questions you might think of! As me for, I’m off to the sweat shop as we speak.
If it really takes 2 Years for certified training, then those “train at home & work at home” programs are a rip-off! Not that I’m looking to get rich quick, I am looking to be gainfully employed quick! Is there any hope? - Jinx
It all depends on what you’re comfortable with, but I know a few women who make decent incomes doing phone sex from home.
I have an acquaintance who used to do that and she said that it is good work for better money than most non-professional jobs.
I have two friends that are/were medical transcritpionists, and they are going back to school because they are losing/lost their jobs. It seems the company told them that they are going to outsource their jobs to India. Apparently, someone in India can do that job just as well as an American, but a lot cheaper. Why pay American wages and social security taxes?
Any company that still has Americans working for it, will be outbid by one that uses Indian workers. I personally dont see any future in it.
IIRC, my friend didn’t have any specialized training. YMMV.
Actually, no, some of them are really good, if you can motivate yourself to learn at home. I know lots of transcriptionists who got their training through one of those. In fact, they outnumber the ones I know who actually went through two years of school. You just have to do the research and find a reputible company.
You can find that with some at-home companies too. There are proofers at the company where I have my part time job (they also work at home, I hope to get one of those positions someday, I enjoy proofing documents way more than typing them). We also have the ability to email a coworker with a job number and have them listen to our blanks, which, while not nearly as nice as having someone right there to help you puzzle it out, is better than being completely on your own.
I am (slowly) training to be a medical transcriptionist. It’s just one of many irons I currently have in the fire. 
The three online schools that Mishell mentioned are a good bet—employers will hire grads from these schools. (Apparently some employers approach the schools, asking for grads, or are willing to waive the “2 years experience” requirement for these schools.) So many of these online schools are rip-offs, and I’ve repeatedly seen only these three online schools cited as the ones that are worth anything. There are probably others that are okay, and some that might even have very satisfied customers, but it’s going to be a gamble. Odd that there are only three decent online schools, but that’s how it seems to be.
Also, I have heard the case made that the online schools are actually sometimes better than some brick-and-mortar schools. The online schools seem to be more up-to-date and are able to adapt and change quicker and more efficiently and accomodate new technologies.
I’ve heard different rumors about outsourcing to India, but I think there are still plenty of jobs available for native-English speaking transcriptionists. The HIPPA thing is concerning people, and last I heard, native-English-speaking transcriptionists are just faster and often, much more accurate. There was also a big scare a while ago where a Pakistani transcriptionist threatened to release patient records from a San Francisco hospital in an attempt to get paid. (Cite here—halfway down the page.)
I haven’t been keeping up with the whole outsourcing issue too closely lately, so maybe things are changing. It depends on who you ask. But I don’t think US-based transcriptionists are dead in the water quite yet. And, some hospitals still want to have their transcription done in-house.
Of course, I’m still just a student, so I am not claiming that I know all that is going on. I could be fully deluded, but I do haunt the transcription message boards, so I don’t think I’m totally out of the loop (she says tentatively). I think that there is a future there, and I think that there will continue to be a future, as long as the transcriptionist is willing to change with new technologies, keep honing their skills, and so forth.
What exactly does a Medical Transcriptionist do? I was thinking of taking classes to be a Medical Office Assistant. Are they the same thing?
Hehe…sorry to post three times in a row, but I keep thinking of stuff I forgot to say.
If you’re looking for something “quick,” transcription probably isn’t the thing for you. Even after training, it takes some time to get up to a level where you’re not struggling to make the minimum line count. I know a couple people who were in my training group when I started with my part time job, they were hired fresh out of school, and they’ve been working 12 hours a day to get their 1000 lines in. 1000 lines at entry level pay is equivalent to about 55 bucks, pretax. I have five years experience, and on a good day, I can do 1000 lines in five hours. (Today is not a good day. I’m posting here to avoid going back to the wretched guy I’ve been trying to decipher). I would have starved if I’d tried to do a production-based pay type job when I first started out. My advice for something thinking of trying at-home medical transcription is to keep your current job and start out part time until you get to a good level of production.
My standard paragraph for explaining what a medical transcriptionist does (because everyone always says, “a what???” when they ask what I do): When a doctor sees a patient, he will usually dictate a report detailing what went on during the visit, the history of the illness, the exam, his impressions of what is wrong, the plan for how to proceed, etc. The transcriptionist then listens to the report, types it, and pretties it up to make it suitable for reading (listening to some of these people talk, you have to think “gee, you’d think with all that school, an English class might have crept in there somewhere…” and I’m not talking about the English-as-a-second-language guys). So nope, not the same thing.
The schools Mishell mentioned will want all students to have good typing skills (I think 45 - 50 wpm is bare minimum for starters, but I haven’t checked lately) and they will want to make sure that the student has decent grammar, punctuation and spelling. (How did I slip through the cracks?) One thing that new students may obsess about are commas–where to put 'em, when to take 'em out, and so forth. I don’t know how comma-obsessed real-world transcriptionists are, but I know that in some circles, a comma is a big deal.
So far Mishell has been saying all the stuff I’ve heard from other sources. It’s not for everyone, it’s not “easy money,” it’s not for someone who thinks they can sit in their bathrobe and slippers and work a few hours and then laze around for the rest of the day. It’s hard work, and you’ve got to like it. So far (at least as far as I’ve gotten with my studies) I do like it. But it sure isn’t easy. There’s a lot of anal-retentive stuff to it, lots of looking up a medical term and trying to figure out which thing the doctor was mumbling. It is not for everyone.
Man, ain’t that the truth. I gave a grammar refresher workshop last week, and I had to stand there arguing with this particular transcriptionist who must have a giant semicolon wedged in her…well…colon. 
She just would not believe me that a semicolon is not required between two independent clauses when a coordinating conjunction is present, a comma is sufficient. I even read aloud from the Gregg manual. I’ve witnessed heated discussions on message boards regarding whether “fingerbreadths” should be one word or two. It’s insanity, sheer insanity.
Oh dear. I had hoped it would be better and less out in the Real World. I was obviously hoping for too much. Scary. :eek:
I answered an ad on Craig’s List and took a test. My qualifications? I was a biology major and, during my years as a journalist, I spent a lot of time pulling quotes off of microcassette recorders. So you certainly can just fall into a job, but I got pretty lucky.