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

5000-700- KB - LinK

Posted: Dec 27, 2009

Kind of a strange question. I was wondering if anyone would know this. I have a chance to take an IC position. The MTSO said that the workload would be 5000-7000 KB a day. I'm not sure exactly what that means. Anyone have any ideas? I have an email into her, but I was wondering if anyone knew how much work this could possibly mean. I'm now among the unemployed and I could really use a job where the work is plentiful.

do you mean 5000-7000 or - 500-700?

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either way, it's a nutty way to define your workload.

5000-7000 - LinK

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I'm sorry. I didn't realize I typed it wrong. It was definitely a different way to define the worload.

wow. I think that is a lot - 500-700

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Maybe they can give you a more realistic estimate in number of lines?

do you know what KB is? - n/m

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n/m

KB - tired MT

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Ye, KB are my initials. But seriously, there are files on my computer that fill a capacity of the volume on my computer with like 1 KB, 2 KB, Like a byte so maybe the company does something weird like how many kilobytes?? to fill up. I don't know,

5000-7000 KB - Tara

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I know of a couple of places that have started using the size of the voice file as a way to define your workload and/or pay rate. Basically they are saying they will provide you with that much audio, regardless of whether or not it's dead air or constant transcription. This particular company may or may not have a lot of dictations that have frequent pauses or dictators who screw up and constantly reword their sentences where you type something and then end up erasing it only to type something else where you wouldn't normally get paid if the line isn't actually in the report. This is their fair way to ensure you are doing the amount of work they promise you or that you promise to take on instead of saying you must meet 6000 lines a day or whatever quota a lot of companies set forth. I don't know exactly how much audio time 5000 to 7000 KB would be, but this is more than likely what the MTSO is talking about.

Sure, but it means nothing. SM - SM

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They're likely talking about the size of the voice files, yes, but 5000-7000 KB (or roughly a little less than 5-7 MB) means nothing. The size of the voice file is determined by the length of dictation (obviously), but also by the type of audio file and its compression. It's a meaningless metric unless they define the other parameters.

means nothing - Tara

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Obviously you and I know that it means nothing until you are given some more information, but the OP and the others didn't seem to have a clue what KB even meant so I was just informing them that this is what the person is talking about.

By the way I knew what KB means - nm - LinK

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n/m

Thanks everyone - LinK

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Thanks for all your replies. Unfortuntely, due to other circumstances, I had to decline the position. She did get back to me and basically said it depends on variables as to how long the files would actually be (which I should have actually known). It was nice to hear what others had to say.

Not sure if this means anything... - CrankyOldBroadOnTheBeach

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I just brought home a sound file from my local IC account. It's in WMF format, medium quality, it's around 8000k and change size-wise, and it's 33 audio minutes.

Because I know the account very, very well, and can do it on warp-speed autopilot, I expect it'll take me about an hour to transcribe. (Or more, if I get to goofing off in between patients.)

If anybody is interested, I'll time myself transcribing it, and also report back a line count when I finish it. This dictator talks fairly quickly and does not do long pauses.

Okay, here are the stats. - CrankyOldBroadOnTheBeach

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The sound file was actually 8883 kb in size, and ran to 36 minutes 36 seconds in length. Again, it was recorded at "medium" quality; if it was recorded at a lower quality, 36 minutes of dictation would have taken up less disk space. The number of kilobytes a file takes up means absolutely nothing, unless you know how many audio minutes it takes up.

It took me exactly one hour to transcribe. This was straight typing, in Word, using an expander, but not for enormous amounts of text; just a few frequently-used words and short phrases. The only "demographics" are the patients' names and the dates of the notes, and the job represented about one day's worth of patients seen in an orthopedist's office. It was all typed into one single Word document. It gets printed on sticky paper and at the office they chop it up and stick it into the patients' charts.

According to the MS Word statistics, the document contained 4900 words, or 30879 characters including spaces. Dividing that by 65 comes out to 475 65-character lines.

475 lines in one hour. Yeow. That's fast. I bill this account by the word, not by the line, so I haven't kept any line-related statistics. At my job with a national, I average about 200 lines per hour on a bad day, a little better on a good day. Of course that is with multiple dictators, some better than others. This IC account is with a very good dictator and I've been doing his work for 12 or 13 years so I know it very, very well.

Now... I would not dream of claiming that I could work an entire 8-hour day at that frightening speed, doing straight typing, but in short sprints, it's certainly doable, depending on the work.

And, in reference to another hotly-contested post on this board recently, it would only require a line rate of 12.6 cents for that batch of dictation to earn 60.00 for the hour.

I will not state the line rate (based on doing some fancy math with the fee for the document based on the per-word rate I charge, and then divided into the number of "lines" in it) I will be paid for this job because I will be accused of lying. But keep in mind it's a local account, for a doc who values my work and pays accordingly.

And all of the above and 50 cents will get you tomorrow's newspaper. I am posting this in the hopes that it will give the original poster SOME idea of what she might be dealing with.

Thank you so much, Cranky - LinK

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I appreciate your taking the time to figure all that out. It was very helpful.

Doesn't really mean anything - here's why: - Tech Support

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Audio is converted to digital format by a process called "sampling" whereby an electronic circuit reaches out and grabs "snapshots" of the audio wave at regular intervals. This snapshot is then encoded into the bits (0's and 1's) that computers understand.

After that, there may be further processing done on this stream of bits - encoding and compression. Finally, it is assembled into a file that follows a certain format (WMV, AVI, and many, many others).

There are many different ways that each of these steps can be handled, so that, for instance, the same 10 seconds of audio might end up as anything from 1 KB to 75 KB in size..or more. And one very interesting thing is that there is only an indirect relationship between the final size of the file and the quality of the audio when the file is turned back into sound at the other end. I've listened to audio samples that differed in their sampling rates by as much as a factor of 4, and the differences in sound quality were very minor.

Bottom line - get the service to tell you what "5000 KB" means in terms that you can understand - i.e., minutes of dictation. Without knowing what algorithms THEY are using to convert sound to digits, including what settings they are specifically using for things like the sample rate (most codecs allow for many different rates), you'll never figure it out even from "typical" sampling information that you sometimes see on the Web that compare different formats to their sizes.

Audio compression - MT who knows

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That was a great explanation and totally true! I have to wonder about the ethical honesty of anyone who wants to pay a transcriber or anyone for that matter by this method. I have to ask myself if the company (or whatever) is really not that knowledgeable and assumes that everything is the same no matter what or if they are truly trying to deceive for the sake of more money and to get the MT (or whoever) to agree to something that they do not completely understand. I would guess that this would be the same thing as if someone was paying someone else for photos according to its compression, i.e. JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or maybe even RAW. It would be the same photo but each would be a different size due to compression or no compression. AND . . . what about if the file is zipped ?? and when the link/audio is selected (clicked) on the MT's end, it just automatically unzips the file? ???? . . . I have to side with the fact that companies (or whoever) know exactly what they are doing and hope the IC will agree to something they don't understand. ??

Every system is different so - ask THEM to translate it...

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...into a more common measure of work that you can understand.

Thanks again everyone - LinK

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Unfortunately, due to other circumstances, I'm not taking the job. I did refer her to a friend of mine so hopefully she'll find out more if she takes the job herself.

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