Patient First Experience - From New Employee Posted: Aug 2nd, 2017 - 1:44 am
I'm on week 4 with Patient First and thought I'd share my experience so far because when I was job searching, I really hated that i could find so little current info on PF.
First off, my training in Virginia was all week, not just 3 days. Flew in on Sunday, home on Friday evening. I was in the office 4 days, M-Th, with time left to come in on Friday morning if there was anything we still needed to cover before the flight home. That ended up not being needed, but you should be aware beforehand that it is indeed all week. That threw me a bit at first based on what I had seen on the forum.
Regardless, they paid for it all, flight, hotel, rental car, and what I considered a generous per diem albeit after the fact (only the per diem after the fact, the rest arranged and paid for by PF).
Weeks 2 and 3 were spent training at home on a 40-hour week, 8 hours per day scheduled, ugh. I've worked as an IC for almost my entire MT career (about 11 years now), so adjusting to a schedule really sucked I must say. I've tried it before, and i just don't like it. No schedule for me, thank you very much. I can deal with almost anything for a few weeks though, and now here I am in week 4 released from training, Yay!
There are a few things I specifically wanted to address, things that bothered me, but I applied anyway.
First...you take the test, they seemingly hire you, fly you out there, only to discover there's a second test once you get there. Yes there is a second test once you get to Virginia. Apparently they've had people take the online test for other people in the past. I really hadn't thought about it before, but I feel a little stupid that I didn't beause really how easy would it be to take an MT test for someone else? For me the second test was very similar to the online one except the audio was horrible. I don't know if it was because of the files specifically or the ear phones or what, but it was bad. If you really love your ear phones, bring them with you, it's allowed! Regardless, even with their ear phones and hard to hear audio, I passed and so did the other lady who was there the same week as me.
Next thing - their odd standards. Yeah okay they definitely do have odd standards. What do I mean by odd? I mean they stray far, so very far from the Book of Style. For example, there is a list of approved abbreviations. If that word or abbreviation is dictated, you use the abbreviation. For example, if they say "congestive heart failure," it doesn't matter that they said it all out, we type it CHF regardless. It's really not that long of a list, but it IS different for sure.
Also on their standards, the excessive verbiage thing. I've seen posts where people seem to think their line counts have suffered because of this rule, but it hasn't bothered me so far. I mean seriously, they say the word "some," and I just skip over it and don't type it. It just means I lift my foot off the pedal that much less. A lot of it is stuff that I have followed in any other job. "She says the pain is a 7/10" and then later in the same paragraph "the pain is a 7/10." You don't type both of those in the same section, or at least I never have in any job. Redundant. PF is just a little more specific with what is redundant.
And again my favorite, gotta say it again, no schedule after released from training. I have a requirement of 1500 lines per day that I must meet in less than 8 hours. Yesterday I did it in about 6-1/2 hours. Today it took me more than 7, had a little trouble first thing this morning. Also a line with PF is 50 characters with spaces, so 1500 lines with PF is equivalent to about 1200 lines if you're used to a 65-character line with spaces.
Also, SOO much work!! I am so dang tired of running out of work!! I have bills to pay and food to buy! I am a single mom, and I applied to PF thinking that I could put up with almost anything for a decent dang wage, enough work, and NO freaking voice recognition. Surprisingly, I actually like the job and am very excited for it. Shoot, I even have paid time off, how freakin cool is that?
Anyway, that's my experience so far for what it's worth. Like I said, I was just released from training yesterday, so take it with a grain of salt I guess.
Post A Reply Reply By Email Options
Complete Discussion Below: (  marks the location of current message within thread)
|
