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M*Modal Today's Top Viewed: Quick Financial Services business Loan and persona.. (Views: 38)

my take for what it is worth - corgi

Posted: May 16th, 2016 - 11:31 pm In Reply to: Fellow MTs, QAs, QA for ILPs please help piece together - what has been happening

I've been in this business close to 40 years; started doing it on a typewriter and Dictaphone, then went to tapes, standard size, then micro, etc.

I did earn as an independent contractor one year $66,000. I was being paid 10-11 cents a line (65 character line). At the time we were in a low paying state. I can imagine transcriptionists in California were making close to 14 cents a line if not more, so I can see making $80,000 a year as "doable."

I remember my husband, who worked at a hospital, coming home in the late 1990s to early 2000s telling about how the radiology department at their hospital had converted to voice recognition for radiology reports. I kind of scoffed it off thinking there was no way you could train a doctor to do voice recognition. What I didn't think of was training actually a software program to do the same.

I think hospitals and clinics started to look for ways to cut costs. At the time I was making that $66,000, I was one of two transcriptionists for an 11 member internal medicine group. If the other transcriptionist made the same I did, that was over $130,000 a year for transcription alone. Of course they weren't paying benefits to us, but still a big chunk of money going out.

MModal (known as Medquist then) was out there and though it didn't have the best of reputations, it was known to hire newbies. I can't tell you how many people I knew wanted to break into the field during those years and how much advice I gave, the most important of which you have to be trained and not expect to walk in without a decent training, that it took expertise in pharmacology, terminology, etc.

I think the hospitals looked for a way to cut costs and started outsourcing. Not only transcription, but food services, environmental services, etc. MTSO's became abundant and tried to offer the lowest price to get the quickest turnaround and then they introduced the disaster of speech recognition, guaranteeing lower rates to their customers but us transcriptionists were getting the raw end of the deal.

I started working for then Medquist in 2006. By 2007, ASR was coming in and we were offered incentives to work it. By 2008 we had lost our bonuses and other incentives we were making doing straight transcription. We were made promises that we could edit 35% faster than transcribing, thus a pay cut was justified.

As time went off the MTSO's continued to bid the lowest they could to get the businesses they did and agreed to impossible demands of quality and turnaround time. Working your assigned schedule became mandatory or serious penalty; audits abounded with ridiculous expectations and point values if (horrors) you didn't punctuate, etc.

I think one day the MTSO's might regret what happened. Brother works for the post office and over the years they cut this and cut that and offered early retirement, etc., to cut costs. The post office found out they didn't have qualified people to do the specialized work since so many took early retirement so they offered incentives for people to come back and work part-time.

Qualified transcriptionists who worked years in the field, who were good in their field, who could decipher this and that and knew what sounded right and what sounded wrong are no longer abundant and quality is suffering. It is deplorable to read the reports we can look up. Mistake after mistake after mistake.

But that's what you get when you choose the practices MModal has chosen to implement and in droves now people are leaving the field.

This is just my take, for whatever it is worth. I'm a few years from retiring; I'll go down with the ship if it goes down and collect unemployment until retirement kicks in.

Sad, I always thought I could support myself by my career. In the last 6-7 years I can't say that anymore.

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