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

I need help with making VR work for me... - PleaseHelp

Posted: Mar 17, 2011

I'm really apparently missing the magic that is needing to make VR work for me. Please if there is someone out there that can provide me with some insight on this, I would be forever grateful. I am struggling with getting to even 150 lph which is overwhelmingly disheartening given that prior to recently having to become a traditional employee again due to a massive life change after 20+ years as a small business owner of a small MTSO I was QAing and/or typing upwards of 250 reports a day for my own clients. Please, I can't make a living doing what I am doing and I know that I can do this if I just learn what tips and tricks all of you brilliant ladies have to offer. My sense is that I am overthinking the platform and the reason I say this is because I find myself listening, editing, then going back and relistening from the beginning. Granted, I am very paranoid about missing something or making a mistake and probably need to relax a little but I know in my heart that I am also missing something when it comes to making the process work faster, more effectively and with me rather than against me. I am on DQS with MQ which I know based I've read is dismal; however, I also know that there are people out there achieving the 300, 400, and more hourly line count on this platform so obviously it's not entirely impossible.

Please, if there is anyone out there who could just give me a little guidance I need to get to a decent line count. The life change that I had was medically motivated and I have to be able to work at home. I am also looking into transitioning to the Coding field but in the meantime I need to make this work so I don't end up being homeless and cancer-stricken to boot.

Please feel free to e-mail me, I would love to hear from anyone out there who could guide me just a little bit.

tips - mtmom

[ In Reply To ..]
Do you know the shortcut keys on your keyboard? They are standard Windows shortcuts, so it has nothing to do with any program. I can email you some of them, such as CTRL right arrow held at the same time will back you up one whole word. I can email those shortcuts to you if you need those. They helped me tremendously. I started out with 150 lph too, and now I'm at 350 lph. It takes time though. Don't beat yourself up over it. Practice and getting used to VR is the way to eventually increase your line count

MTMOM - PleaseHelp

[ In Reply To ..]
Oh my goodness, I would be so grateful. I'm ready to cry. I've been feeling sick all day long since my medical issues are gastro related and I think the stress of this is just making it worse. I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm really very near frantic. Please if you could e-mail those to me I would be eternally grateful to you.

I can't make any money with VR ... - VRhater

[ In Reply To ..]
I could never edit more than 200 lines an hour with voice rec at 4 cents a line. It was much more labor intensive than transcribing with the awkward hand and wrist movements and positions to edit. At least 50% of every report needed to be "edited."

Bottom line for me is voice rec sucks. The transcription companies charge the same rates as always, but pay their MTs 50% less. It only profits the software makers and the MTSOs.

I refuse to do it anymore. I'm not going to allow my family and life to suffer so the MTSO can make larger profits. If straight transcription goes away then so be it. I'll get an office job that has benefits. Until then I'll strive to keep doing straight transcription and make a buck or two.

The last company I worked for switched me to a straight typing account that would eventually be voice rec. I was pretty resentful of the idea that I was making normal money doing the straight typing and simultaneously training the software that would eventually allow my company to pay me 50% less AND take food out of MY family's mouth. No way. I found another job.

I don't understand why so many allow themselves to be walked all over making 3 cents a line all for the sake of working at home. I guess some people can make it on $8 an hour, but I can't.

We VR editors should call in "sick" for a week, - and then ask them how fair they think 3cpl is.

[ In Reply To ..]
If we don't edit, who will? The Indians?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

I would love to see the "editing"... - Baffled

[ In Reply To ..]
an Indian editor could/would provide. I'm sorry, all the hype that they have actual doctors over there performing the transcription does not impress me. The work I've seen coming out of there is a trainwreck. I'm sure these people are fine doctors in their own right; however, being a doctor doesn't mean that they can actually transcribe a proper document. The ASR is no better. I'm sure there might be a platform out there that actually produces a quality document; however, you need a quality dictator in order to get to that point, and the truth is the providers can't be bothered to provide quality dictation and the MTSO's won't force them. Again, I would love to talk to the folks on here that claim they can produce 500+ lph on ASR because I am wildly curious as to what platoform they are on, what keyboard tricks they use, what their accounts are like, and how long it took them to get to 500+ lph. For that matter, I would love to hear from people claiming to be doing 400 lph, even 300 lph. I work my arse off and I'm lucky to top out at 200 on DQS.

You said you'd love to hear from me. - Here I am

[ In Reply To ..]
I work on the BeyondTXT platform at Transcend. I work on an account that I know very well, which converted to speech rec last April 1 (and it was rather interesting at first). I use every keyboard shortcut in the book and a considerable few that I've thought up myself and mapped into my Shorthand expander. I also speed up the audio whenever I can, but believe me, we still have our share of stinky dictators that speech rec has trouble with, mixed in with a few that seem to be "one with the machine," so to speak.

We get a weekly editing proficiency report in the e-mail. Here are my editing LPH numbers since January. (These are calculated on the amount of time the report is actually open for editing on my computer, and do not include time spent doing other things.)

414
443
434
443
437
475
471
455
525
461

Any further questions?

Here I am... - Baffled

[ In Reply To ..]
I would love to know what your shortcuts are... the Transcend platform must be one of the ones that actually works the way it should... I envy you given DQS seems to have been created by a half-wit.

Shortcuts... just for instance - using Shorthand

[ In Reply To ..]
For quickly jumping from word to word, the normal command is CTRL-right arrow. That's too far away from the home keys, so I remapped that function to CTRL-J.

CTRL-semicolon has now become end of document, and ALT-semicolon is end of current line. CTRL-quote mark is delete, and ALT-quote mark is backspace.

CTRL-H is delete the word to the left of the cursor.

CTRL-comma backs up and puts a comma after the last previous word. CTRL-period backs up and puts a period after the last previous word and capitalizes the first letter of the next word (i.e. to split a phrase into 2 sentences).

Those are just a few of my tricks.

How did I arrive at all this? By figuring out what kinds of keystroke functions I was constantly doing, and then creating Shorthand expansions for those things.

transcend platform is BeyondTxt-sm - former transcender

[ In Reply To ..]
In my opinion, BeyondTxt is an awful platform. Even after working on it for quite a number of months, this was still my opinion. It was unintuitive. Features that should logically communicate to each other seamlessly behind the scenes did not. It sounds like from the poster above that there are accounts where the speech recognition engine does a half-decent or even a decent job. I wouldn't know because the accounts I worked on produced mostly garbled messes, and certainly one could easily transcribe from scratch with a good expansion program in FAR less time than it took to edit those messes. The pay rate for editing was an insult not only to my bank account, but to the reality of how poor the speech engine was for the majority of my dictators and how severe the editing that was required.

Beyondtxt is horrible! It is very, very slow, commands do not work half the time, - not me

[ In Reply To ..]
you have to use a mouse to get from that horrible demographic screen to start a report because the blinker stops up in the middle of the speed control on top, you have to hit the commands about 3 times for them to even start to work. VR is even worse on this platform. It had gotten better but now it is worse than when they started. Nothing is put into correct format, words are not spelled correctly, it abbreviates when it is not supposed to, expands when it should not (like milligrams rather than mg), makes medications all caps, not just first letter, and continues to make the same mistake for each doctor every time they dictate and some of these doctors may do 15 reports every day. I think Transcend is just too lazy to audit the sloppy mess that Mmodal is putting out and figuring that it does not make any difference that the MLS is not making money, they can just fix the garbage that is being hurled at us. Transcend is awful about not caring or trying to help and the trainers are only able to teach very elementary instructions, they do not help in any way about how to get around these issues.

Really? Mine works just fine! - not a problem

[ In Reply To ..]
nm

I agree with the poster about how bad it is. I just finished my - not mine

[ In Reply To ..]
shift and I found a lot more problems that the other person stated. How about the ., after words, punctuation messed up, no caps at beginning of sentences, complete garble when the dictation is clear. How about no headers or subheaders created in reports? I have to click on a job 3 or 4 times just to get them to open after they are downloaded. Jobs are slow in returning. The response from BeyondTxt for anything is very, very slow. I spend half my shift in waiting mode for everything and I do not have a slow computer. My team lead was anything but helpful when I said something, told me it was just a good thing because this way I was guaranteed a job. What an answer!

Why are you the only one who never has a problem? If you read the - question

[ In Reply To ..]
forum board on the web site, everyone is complaining about it. You obviously do not do much work on VR or on BeyondTxt or are in management and trying to defend it.

I totally understand where you are coming from. - CrankyOldBroadOnTheBeach

[ In Reply To ..]
When I first went to VR, my manager had to talk me down off the ledge a couple of times... but now I'm the one talking other people down.

It's an entirely different skill set than straight typing, and it involves careful listening and concentration. If you can transcribe, you can edit. Really. Honest.

And the first skill to start acquiring after the listening and concentration is use of shortcut keys. As many as you possibly can. But not all at once.

I was on a training team for a short period of time, and our suggestion to our trainees was to assign yourself just a couple of shortcuts at a time, and as soon as you've got those ones working well for you, and they are second nature, add on a couple more.

I don't work where you work; but if I were you, I'd ask my team lead or supervisor or manager if there are any tutorials, or cheat sheets, or tip sheets, or even training sessions available for people like you who are struggling. Where I work, we have all of those things available.

I've taken it all several steps further on my own, assigning a lot of my own customized shortcut keys (using Shorthand commands) and trying to assign them as much as possible to the home keys, using ones that are not already taken by the platform. There are actually a lot you can use, including CTRL or ALT with all the non-letter keys, i.e. period, comma, slash, semicolon, quote, left and right brackets, etc.

I've used some of these combinations to remap some common functions that are further away from the home keys. (I can take my right hand off the home keys no problem; it's landing it back in the right place that's the issue.) Just for instance, I've made it so that ALT plus semicolon is the same as END (for end of line) and CTRL plus semicolon is the same as CTRL-END for end of document.

Having said that... again I highly recommend taking the built-in shortcut keys one at a time, and if your company/platform provides any kind of ongoing productivity statistics, keep track of them, so you can track your improvement.

I wish you the very best of luck, and just remember to take a deep breath!

VR and abysmal line counts... - ButtsAsleep

[ In Reply To ..]
I've been at it all day today, and I've managed to get my lph up from two digits to three digits per hour but they are still pretty dismal considering people are talking about 400, 500, 600 lph. Suffice that I am nowhere even near that range, LOL. My butt has gone numb. I so need help with respect to finding a way to keep my sanity, stay off the ledge, make at least 300 lph though more would be better, and find a way to keep my butt from going numb. OMG, it actually hurts right now... my tailbone has declared war on my lower extremities.

I've never seen 500-600 lph - mtmom

[ In Reply To ..]
I work for Transcend and receive a weekly report for how fast I am doing at editing. I consistently edit about 350-390 lph. I have never seen anyone on my list go higher than the 400s, and those are a small number of people. Most do between 250-350 lph. As for shortcuts, learn them just a couple at a time. That is what I did. As I was comfortable with them, I'd learn a couple of more. My editing has improved dramatically since then, along with speeding up dictators that can be sped up (I know that's hard with ESL). I personally have not had many problems with BeyondTXT overall. There are some formatting issues, but with the shortcuts I have put in my expander, having to format really takes no time at all. Also, it helps me to format the report before I start listening to it. Then, all I have to do it listen and fix words because the formatting is already done. Improved my edit rate dramatically. :)

MTMOM... can you share... - Buttsasleep

[ In Reply To ..]
some of your shortcuts, please.

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