Medical Transcriptionist Career
Medical Transcriptionist Career
The Real Poop
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis—the longest word in the dictionary and you'll need to know it.
Maybe. If you're transcribing for a doctor who is diagnosing lung disease caused by the silica dust of active volcanoes. Probably not a frequent diagnosis, but it could happen if, say, the patient lived on the big island of Hawaii near the active volcano, Kilauea.
The point is, a medical transcriptionist will need to be familiar with that word and others like it. You'll need to know how to spell it and use it grammatically in a sentence.
Words like:
- Xerostomia or "dry mouth"
- Horripilation, otherwise known as goosebumps
- Borborygmus, tummy rumbles
- Rhinorrhea, a runny nose
- And the ever popular epistaxis, or nosebleed
These words and more—oh so many more—will have to be on the tip of your fingers at all times, making the job well-suited for those in medical school and former spelling bee champs.
Provided those med students and spelling whizzes can type, of course. Or rather "keyboard," as the lingo now goes. Oh, and you also have to be willing to work for around $30,000 a year.
Medical transcriptionists listen to hours and hours of tapes of doctors talking the talk—sometimes doctors with very heavy accents, who mumble, and who speak really quickly—and are expected to transcribe rapidly and accurately, using nothing more than a decent word processing software and some seriously fast flying fingers.
Twenty-five words per minute (wpm in transcriptionist speak) is not fast enough.
Thirty-five words per minute is not even close.
Forty-five words per minute is alright for the thumbless.
Fifty or more words per minute...blindfolded...and maybe, just maybe, we're getting close to the kind of speed you need to do this job well.
Of course, you'll need at least 95% accuracy.
Modern medical transcription also deals with the growing use of voice recognition software, which turns a transcriptionist into a careful editor.
Doctors using voice recognition software will speak into a recording device and the computer will type it up for them. Brilliant, right? However, if a doctor mumbles a lot or has an incompatible accent, then there will be a need for a lot of editing, or a transcriptionist will have to retype the whole thing.
Considering that the industry is moving from typing to using voice recognition software, the pay for this job is decreasing. Transcription jobs are often paid by how many pages or lines of finished, edited product are produced rather than an hourly salary.
Some sources claim medical transcriptionists earn on average $40,000 a year, with the ability to earn $70,000 if they produce a lot of work and really put the pedal to the metal (source).
Other sources in the field paint a very different picture, where payment for finished lines of transcribed and edited text averages as low as four to eight cents (source).
The norm is probably somewhere in between, though there will certainly be folks trying to get people to do work for peanuts. Unfair wages are unfortunately commonplace, especially in situations offering money-making "work from home" opportunities.
You probably should expect to earn in the low $30,000s working as a medical transcriptionist.
There are many reputable medical transcription courses out there—some in two-year community colleges that won't cost you an arm, a leg, and a kidney or two.
You'll need to understand human anatomy, physiology, common drug names, diagnoses, and medical terminology. If you're transcribing for the mental health industry (psychiatrists, psychologists, etc.), you'll need to be intimately familiar with the lingo of that world. If you happen to be a med student or a psychology student, then you'll have a leg up on the competition.
You'll need medical reference books at your disposal (or some really good Googling skills), and on the job experience as well to make you more valuable and accurate.
Much of what you'll be doing is transforming a doctor's notes into typed reports for others to read. Some doctors use shorthand that you'll need to get used to. Others will spell everything out for you and make your job way easier.
While voice recognition software can be a help, it's not going to work in all cases and it's no substitute for an actual person's knowledge, judgement, and ability to interpret notes into text.
The device you'll most likely be using allows you to listen to the doctor's recorded speech using headphones while you control the playback with a foot pedal. The set-up is sort of like driving a car, except the pedal operates the digital recording and doesn't take you anywhere. The pedal can slow down the voice to match your typing speed, which is why it helps to be fast and accurate. You'll probably want to finish sometime before the apocalypse.
If you are using voice recognition software, you will be listening to the doctor's recording and matching it up to the text—using common sense and editorial prowess as your guide. Oh, and did we mention that you'll still have to be super-fast?
In some instances, you'll be able to do this job from home, assuming you have the headphones/foot pedal setup and all the software and reference materials that you need. Other jobs will require you to work on-site either in a doctor's office or a hospital clinic.
Some transcriptionists who work in a doctor's office may be required to do light secretarial work in addition to transcription. Others may need to enter reports based on Electronic Health Records (EHR), which is a digital version of the charts that doctors maintain on their patients.
While there is concern among transcriptionists about transcription work being farmed out overseas, there are HIPPA privacy policies regarding medical records and personal information that keeps much of the work within the USA. You'll be typing out notes about conjunctivitis until the computers take over and become our overlords.