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Per character pricing - Blondie

Posted: Jul 29, 2014

Just found out company has sold transcription account to Acusis. What is the formula for figuring out how much per billable characters equal an hourly rate? I'm going from hourly to per character and have no clue how to figure out what is a good price to keep my current income level. I type about 130 lines per hour.

Acusis pays by line. I assume the norm of 65 characters is a line. - Majority is VR

[ In Reply To ..]
An earlier discussion said they pay 3-4 cents per line for VR (voice recognition). At 130 lph, you would make $3.90 to $5.20 an hour. Straight typing is 7-8 cpl, so you would make $9.10 to $10.40 an hour until your accounts switched to VR. This pay is sadly about average. I know that's not good news, especially to go from hourly pay after being sold out.

When I worked there, the min. lines/hr. was 250. - Impossible to do on their software. :(

[ In Reply To ..]
nmsg

How much per line? - blondie

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anyone now how much they pay per line? Very few people can type 250 lines per hour this will take an entire team of over 100 people down, I don't think they wanted that when they have taken on more clients because of the buy.

Most of that new work will end up in India - or the Philippines. nm

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Unfortunately, they don't care about the team. - They just want

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the accounts.

That's what happened when they bought - our company a few years back. nm

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I'm at Acusis and do 250 lph, but all VR - BeenThere

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Once you get used to software, editing at 250 lph is easily accomplished. Very rarely do you get straight typing. Pay is a matrix which s very hard to explain. I think I average a little over $8 per hour. They may be hiring FT.

Thank you for.... - blondie

[ In Reply To ..]
your response. I am currently being paid over $16 an hour (after 30+ years)and the transcription part of the company I work for has been sold to Acusis. Apparently we are going to get paid by the line because our clients do not, nor do they want VR. I also think that if they try to change the clients from in office MEDENT to their software, we will lose the clients. I have to admit I'm a bit nervous about this whole thing.

Just to warn you - when we were bought by a national MTSO - (not Acusis)

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We were told accounts would stay the same for a "reasonable" time, same supervisor, etc. Within a month, switched to new accounts, within 2 months, switched to new software and supervisor, within 3 months switched to VR. I quit when I realized I was literally making minimum wage after 25+ years of experience (including 15 years of VR experience).

The MO of these companies is to acquire the accounts and then offshore them. That is how they make money. If they can't offshore (but they are VERY good at convincing facilities how wonderful and cost-saving it is), you can guarantee that you will be switched to VR. So, to make $16 an hour at VR at 4 cpl, you would have to average 400 cpl every hour, every day. If making 3 cpl, $16 an hour is even more impossible.

So i've heard - blondie

[ In Reply To ..]
I'm sure this is what they are doing. However, the clients we have are definitely private and decided years ago that they will not do VR so they will end up hiring a transcriptionist that they can work with local. I'm just riding the wave and then will offer my services to keep their docs happy. Plus I only type MRIs/X-rays which I've heard they don't want to be bothered with anyway. They had the big meeting today so now people will be dropping like flies.

Not worth it. Pay is low, and they're - Nuance wannabes. nm

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