A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry

Why I would NOT recommend ATSI - Sassy Pants

Posted: Feb 19, 2010

Hello all! I am new to this forum and would just like to share my thoughts with you as I have read through some of your postings about different MT companies out there, like "Should I work here?" So, as nicely as I can say it, in a matter of my opinion:

My Top Ten Reasons why I would NOT recommend ATSI:

1. The pay. Straight CPL no matter if it's days, nights, weekends, holidays.

2. No raises, incentives, or bonuses.

3. NOT employee status...EVER...even after 90 days, you will always be IC status!

4. No benefits, insurance, PTO, sick pay, holiday pay, NADA!

5. Supervisors change every 3 months, no one stays there for long.

6. No Christmas bonus, no employee appreciation, no referral $, NADA!

7. If you don't work, you don't get paid. Weekends are required!

8. If you have a question, they are too busy to answer you, so then you spend 15 minutes searching for it on Google and your productivity goes down, or you send it through with blanks and get a bad QA audit. It's either fast and sloppy to make Productivity or slow and good to make Quality, which one do you want?

9. They change the account specs once a month, you learn the "right" way to do it, then they change it back again.

10. Other MTs find out you work there and they avoid you like the plague! Not to mention other potential employers when job hunting.

And my personal experience: The initial supervisor who hired me (she is long gone, thank God) was so mean to me that I cried everyday for the first month I worked there

AND I also had to get a seasonal/temp job just to pay the bills when I first started with them because my first paycheck was less than $100 for 2 weeks of work. I even filed a complaint with the DOL (because being paid piece rate, you are supposed to at least be paid minimum wage if your piece rate wage is less than that) AND I was not even making minimum wage (DOL said I had no case b/c I was an IC.)

I just quit there after 1.5 years to go to a better position. But, as much as I hated being with ATSI, I still left on good, friendly, professional terms b/c I am better than that!

Just a little information for anyone who is interested. Thank you!

kinda sounds like the Q... or any other MTSO for that matter. - just sayin.. NM

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Good gravy - could the font get any smaller?? - old eyes

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DUH - Sassy Pants

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MY BAD! SORRY!

You said it! - Was there 3 days!

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I tried ATSI and in 48 hours still had no work and account specs that were 10 pages long. I ran out of ink printing out all of their instructions, regulations, account specifics, and on and on. I was IC and still told that no matter if we were employee or IC we had to stay with the work schedule we reported we would do with no variation. They had better check out the laws regarding ICs because they cannot tell ICs when to work, only when the work has to be completed. I did not mind giving them a general idea of when I would work during the day but they wanted a shift time with no changes whatsover. The IT person took all morning to load their dumb program into my computer and their platform, which is their homemade version was so confusing and time consuming for demographics that you would spend more time checking and rechecking, clicking and moving, pasting and copying than you would typing. Between emails and IM you could have never got anything done. I finally emailed the head of operations who hired me and told her politely that I just could not learn all of this new stuff at this time and quit. I would have been a nervous wreck. Thank God I did not quit my other job before I got an idea of what this place was like. I went back to my other job and felt like I was in heaven! Goes to show, the grass ain't always greener!

I agree with you! - Sassy Pants

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After I emailed my resignation letter, she said basically "Sorry to see you go, would you mind telling me why so that we can make changes in the future?" WHAT DO I SAY?

To Sassy Pants - Was there 3 days

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I did not get any reply to my email of resignation. I suppose it was because I never got a chance to even type one report for them. If they would have asked me that question, I am afraid my list would have been very long. Below are a few of the suggestions I would give them.

1. Stop the conflicting stories, i.e. told on email the account was very high in ESL; told by phone that there were only 3.

2. Get a user-friendly platform and forget your homemade version.

3. Have someone set up the MT who does not take phone calls while they have control of your computer and you just sit and sit and watch and wait for over 3 hours.

4. Do not tell MTs there is a lot of work on an account, and it turns out to be an over flow account with work coming in after the hours they have you scheduled to work (when the in-house MTs go home for the day).

5. Cut out IM and use just email. Both is overwhelming and IM is just too interuptive and distracting.

6. Get rid of the "warning messages" that come in every minute when reports are downloaded but not yet typed. For example,"this is your first warning, this is your second warning, this is your third warning." Good grief!

7. Your pre-employment testing is way too long! It took me a total of 3 hours and that was less time that each section told me it would take to complete.

I guess I could go on but that gets the point across. I could never recommend this company to anyone.

I hate to see these messages as I took a job with ATSI, sm - 3 weeks ago

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I have not had these same issues. I have no problem with the system, it seems pretty user friendly. Yes, the e-mails warning you of a job being sent back to the pool if not completed by a certain time are very annoying and my first few days with them, there were plenty of them as I was just getting used to physicians and trying to learn them, but sent a few IMs and they made sure those jobs I was working on did not return to the pool (to be typed by another transcriptionist). I think the first few days I worked, I actually typed some jobs that ended up going back to the pool and I didn't even realize it. This sucked big time. In any event, the real issue that I am having right now is that there is no work. I am scheduled for 7 hours, yet I find most of that time being spent waiting on jobs to type. I am hoping this is not going to be the case in the future. I am hoping to make employeed status myself and have to question whether this will be possible since you have to type so many lines in a pay period to be able to do this. If there are no jobs to type, there are no lines to type, then there is no reason to think one would be able to get the employee status. I am really not happy with these posts. I am quite happy with the people that I am working with. I had no problems with the tech guy getting on my computer. It was pretty quick and I did not find him taking up too much of my time at all. I do find the people that I have had to ask questions to very helpful. My account specs have not changes and they seem to be pretty simple although there are several pages to these, some of these pages are samples of reports, not account specs, so there has not been a problem in that regard for me at all. The system is different, but extremely user friendly. After all, it is a word based program and you are just typing in word. Looking up patients on the schedule has not been an issue either. Just click the button, do a search and select the correct DOV, if not on schedule, put in notation and mark for the client. I am very concerned now though after reading these posts. I am glad they were here though. I have a few questions out to my super as to what to expect in the future. I just hope that I am not disappointed by the reponse or what actually transpires in the weeks to come.

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