This is not a job your daughter wants - At all Posted: Mar 3rd, 2018 - 2:46 am In Reply to: You cant just start this field. You have to go to school - not sure why you think sm
1. You just can't get hired "off the street." It takes training and education to do this job. When I was young, they used to train you at the hospital. Now you must PAY for the education/training yourself. I don't know how much, but I would guess in the neighborhood of $2000-$3000.
2. They very seldom hire "newbies." Why should they? There are plenty of experienced transcriptionists around who are out of work and can't find a job. Experience includes 20 years or more.
3. The wages are starvation/poverty wages. Think minimum wage or if an independent contractor, which a lot of outsourcing companies are going to today, LESS than minimum wage (which is why they are hiring independent contractors only). You then have no benefits, no time off, and must pay the employer's half of social security tax (PLUS YOUR OWN, amounting to over $2000.00 or more on those low wages) each year at tax time or pony up $500.00 a quarter for quarterly income taxes, bringing your wages to even LESS than the less-than-minimum-wage you were originally getting. They don't care. That's why they're hiring only independent contractors. Think 3 cents per line piece rate, or even less. Most places want at least 200 lines per hour. Do the math for the hourly wage -- $6.00 an hour. Federal minimum is woefully low at $7.25 an hour. If you live in a higher minimum wage state, you are better off to just find something else and get more money, and more consistent money (see #4 below for the meaning of "consistent money").
4. They are always running out of work. No work equals no money.
5. Sweatshop conditions. You can't do 200 lines an hour if they are always switching you around to new accounts (that is, new hospitals). There is a ramp-up time of at least six months to a year to get proficient enough to be able to do all dictations and all reports (including English-as-a-second language dictators) in a manner in which you can produce 200 to 300 lines an hour consistently, and that is only if you have enough work to do that, which generally is doubtful. You never know when your main account, which you might have been able to get proficient at, is going to decide to go with some other outsourcing service -- so there goes all the proficiency you had and you have to start over on a new account. They will still expect 200 lines an hour immediately and will fire you if you don't do it immediately (I do think they give you an extended amount of time, maybe 3 or 4 months, to get up to speed initially when you first start but if they give you a new account to do if you have been with them for a while, they don't). I was fired for the very reason of no-can-do 200 lines per hour on a new account immediately. There is no way you CAN do it immediately. I don't think they switched me deliberately to a new account in order to fire me because my main account disappeared after the Nuance "hack" last summer. They kept loading me up with new accounts and I could NOT do 200 lines per hour on any of them because they did not give me enough time to get proficient with them. One of those accounts had multiple hospitals within it with multiple ESL dictators each in addition, and I had four other accounts as well, all new (to me). Because we are a "dime a dozen," they had no reason to cut me any slack and they didn't. QA trolls your work every day for errors. One error per week that they consider "critical" (such as typing 94-year-old man when it's a 93-year-old man, typing a medication that the auditor says is a different medication, that is, a "he said/she said" judgment -- on listening to it, it could be either one, or numerous other similar things earns you a $120.00 pay cut for that week when they dock your pay, and they dock your pay across all reports, not just that one report they said you made an error on. Nuance docks your pay. I think others do it too but I don't know which ones. It's the luck of the draw. And that's the way it is with reports. If you get stuck with 5 reports from a bad dictator as I did one night, my line count was shot to hell for that week. Again, I was fired for that because I wasn't producing 200 lines per hour for the entire week due to those five reports one night. You are simply a number on a spreadsheet to them. Fail to meet lines per hour, 99% quality (99.6% for M-Modal), or send too many reports into QA (which you have to do when you cannot figure out a word since they instituted a "no blanks" policy) for two weeks in a row and you are given a verbal warning. Do it again and it's a performance action plan for four weeks. If you somehow make it through that, then ONE ERROR for the NEXT SIX MONTHS will get you fired immediately. That's why I got fired. I made it through that month's performance action plan but several weeks after that, made one error and was fired. You must make no errors for SIX MONTHS. When you consider what we do is keystrokes, and every keystroke is a potential error, it doesn't take much figuring out that your chances of being fired after a performance action plan are excellent. The supervisors are not autonomous. They are not allowed to use their own judgment. They are pressured by the company to swiftly fire someone for anything of this type and if they do not, they lose THEIR jobs.
6. Not only all of the above, but they also keep track of how much time you spend on the keyboard versus how much time you don't. When you consider that you are constantly looking up words, drugs, or even places (if you live on the West coast for example but you have an East coast hospital) or names of geographical features, you can see that you will have your hands off your keyboard looking these items up. And, incidentally, that is all factored into your lines per hour, so between looking things up and trying to ramp up on a new hospital, it's pretty likely going to be impossible to do 200 lines per hour and if you have been there for a year or two, expect to get fired. They don't care because there are (or at least they think) there are 100 people available to replace you.
7. The one good thing for me at least was that I was able to get unemployment, which wasn't very much because of the starvation/poverty wages, but at least I got it.
8. I refuse to do this work again unless conditions change substantially to include better pay, no docking of pay and no sweatshop-type conditions.
Just tell your daughter to get something else. Anything else is better than this.
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