Industry Trends - CoolMT

I'm new to this board, but have been in the business a while.  There's obviously a lot of dissatisfaction on the way work is being moved to India and Speech Recognition.  Its affected me, too.  But, it is what it is.  The healthcare facilities  are being forced to cut costs, and the MTSOs have to respond to keep the business, which is unfortunate for us.

First, there was India.  HealthScribe, Focus Informatics, CBay, Heartland and others pushed this as a lower cost alternative to hospital CFOs and they took the bait.  Quality was awful at first, but improved a little over time, making this an attractive way cut costs.

For those CFOs reticent of India, but still wanting to save costs, Speech Rec was born.  eScription was at the forefront.  Now owned by Nuance, they still are.  This enabled the MT to be more productive by the text already being 90% plus present and they just needed to fix a few things.  This, of course, depends on the quality of the Speech Rec engine and how they qualify the dictators.

Some are successful on Speech Rec and some are not.  For those that are not, this means lower pay as most MTSOs cut your rate depending on the productivity there are expecting.  Since this is an average, some are above and some are below.  The ones below suffer.

Fast forward to 2010.  Healthcare is under more pressure than ever.  CFOs are looking wherever they can for savings.  Spheris bought HealthScribe giving them access to India.  They then brought in Multi Modal for Speech Rec.  Nuance bought Focus and then eScription, giving them India and Speech Rec.  They also bought the Speech Rec engine MQ uses, Phillips SR.  CBay bought MQ, giving MQ access to the offshore operations of CBay.  Transcend uses both eScription and Multi Modal and uses contractors for offshore.

Point is, these moves for cost cutting are coming directly from the price pressures from the facilities.  While India is less than 10% of the work being done, Speech Rec is probably at 40%, more than 60% if you're just counting the top MTSOs.

While we can't do anything about any of these trends, what we can do is band together and make a stand for what is fair.  I'm sure the thought of Unionization has been floated out there before, but why hasn't it taken hold?

I thought of two reasons: 1) with the low wages we already make, paying Union dues would be too much and 2) the work we do directly effects patient outcomes, and I could not think about someone being denied proper treatment because the report wasn't there.

 Consider this:  No hospital could withstand not receiving medical reports for a week.  This is actually far less than one week, but just being conservative.  No MTSO would have the resources to combat a walkout and the lashback from their clients.  In other words, they would forced to meet demands immediately and most likely before any type of walkout happened.

We need to capitalize on the leverage we have and Band together.  With the risk of a walkout being less than a week, the dues wouldn't need to be that much.  For those not familiar with Unions, the dues are to supplement a workers pay when they strike in protest for better conditions.

I didn't start this post to promote a union, but now, the more I think about it, it's the best option.  Let's see what you guys have to say and see where it goes.