Here is my correspondence with AHDI - see message

I got this note from a guy named Doggett in response to a note I sent to ADHI about throwing roadblocks in front of MTs to getting work and earning a decent living:

"On March 24, AHDI members and staff will go to Capitol Hill to speak with their federal legislators, key members of the House and Senate, and administrative agency officials about the critical need for “meaningful use” and EHR certification regulations to recognize how medical transcriptionists work hard to ensure the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of patient health information and how the narrative is an important and valuable tool for clinical decision making.

 AHDI’s education approval program prevents predator schools from taking advantage of those who want to pursue a career in medical transcription.

 AHDI’s certification program sets high standards for the profession, provides medical transcriptionists with an opportunity to promote and market their professional skills and knowledge, and demonstrates to those within the general healthcare sector that medical transcriptionists are professionals vital to the quality of health information and the quality of care.

 These are but a few examples of how AHDI is advancing the profession.  I encourage you to join us in these efforts.  Too much is at stake for the medical transcription profession for MTs to sit on the sidelines.  They must take ownership over their futures and join the effort to create a viable and successful future for the profession.  I would be happy to discuss the wide variety of opportunities for involvement.  Please let me know if you  have any questions.  Thank you."

This is my answer:

Here’s my problem with your second paragraph. When you say “recognize”, what are you saying? Are you advocating recognition so that we can be paid what we are worth? In other words, what we used to make? It is directly due to associations like yours that we have had our pay cut by 1/3 by counting characters and dividing by 65.  This strips out all the other unquantifiable work we must spend time on to produce a coherent report such as demographic lookup, reformatting the page, etc. That is why we counted by gross line in the first place.  And now you have come up with another roadblock to making a decent wage: VBC. So now you don’t want us to be paid for hitting the spacebar? What will be next? It seems like you are the fox who has appointed himself to guarding the hen house. So to ask that we trust you on “Capitol Hill” is a lot to ask with your track record. Sorry to be so brutal but it is warranted.

 But let’s pretend that you do have our best interests in mind. That would require you to ask that “Capitol Hill” ban offshoring our medical records and ferret out the front companies that claim the work is done domestically while funneling the processing out the back door, the product of which has proven 90% unsatisfactory when it comes to an accurate medical record, and has injected yet another roadblock to a living wage for American MTs. The slave wages they will work for in the third world is something with which we can’t compete. Then there is the matter of security and privacy. It is well known that the cultures of third world countries where our medical records end up, engage in honor killings and child prostitution that are winked at by the authorities in those countries. If these people will brutalize their own family members without compunction, what makes anyone trust them when they assure us they won’t sell our medical records to the highest bidder and expect our HIPAA provisions to be enforced by the same winking authorities?  Are you going to tell Capitol Hill about the medical records being sold out of a transcription centers in India reported in October 2009? If so, do you really expect them to do anything about it if it won’t advance their self interest in power, perks and pensions for themselves? This is whistling past the graveyard in my opinion.

 You mention EMR and meaningful use. To which EMR engine are you referring? Point and click? If so, I don’t see how that is going to 1) save any money for the healthcare provider (see attachments) or 2) provide jobs for MTs.  

 Obviously, what you describe in your third paragraph hasn’t worked. Perhaps you need to spend your money on advertising them out of existence.

 The debate about certification continues. I have never felt that I needed to pay some self-invented, self-interested entity to anoint me qualified when I can prove it myself. This just seems like another way to extract money out of an already beleaguered industry.