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

What has happened to MT'ing? - Having a hard time believing it

Posted: Jun 14, 2011

(I am not a "suit." :-) ) I would like to know from some of you what is the going rate now (really) for lines per hour or hourly pay and if there are even steady hours anymore. I just can't believe that this "profession" has gone downhill so much and downhill so quickly in even the last 5 years. I wonder what the next 5 years will look like or if there will even be MTs? If anyone has left the "profession" because they just can't make a living doing this anymore, what are you doing now and how long did it take to make the change or find another career path? Have you noticed the ad in The Record magazine this month? MQ now has ads for coders just like they have ads for MTs. Are they preparing for the future? Like are they getting ready for no more MT and moving to the coding side? ??

The fact that MTSOs, & companies like them, are - now doing coding, is one big reason - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
why I haven't jumped on the coding bandwagon like so many MTs are currently doing. I see it headed in exactly the same direction as MT. If it pays better than MT, then you just know that hospitals can't wait to outsource it. And if it can be outsourced, it can be offshored.

It also is being done on the EMR systems now - Ellen

[ In Reply To ..]
and I know a major HMO told their coders that they will not have a job in approximately 2 years, and that is a union hospital. The EMR system is replacing MTs and coders. Sad, I am looking for a new profession as well, but not in medical records. It is all about saving money.... Just a fact.

In years past, the healthcare industry used to be a - stable field to get into. (sm)

[ In Reply To ..]
I comfortably rode out many economic downturns and recessions as an MT. While my college-degreed friends were losing their high-tech jobs left and right, MT continued to be there for me.

Fast forward to now, and I wouldn't recommend ANY aspect of health care to anyone. It's a broken system. Once the medical care industry was taken over by HMOs, it all started going downhill. The job opportunities, the pay, and most definitely our health care. Many good doctors left the place I worked for when it was taken over by a large HMO, and the docs that came on board were just a bunch of mindless clock-watchers. The hospital also became so top-heavy with management under the HMO, that soon it seemed like for every 1 *real* worker (nurse, MT, receptionist, med. records clerk), there were 10 managers. Utterly ridiculous.

Now, just about every job in health care is paying less, being outsourced and/or offshored, and DUMBED DOWN. In this current state of the industry, I wouldn't recommend any aspect of it to anyone, from file clerk all the way up to physician. Health care has become a RACKET.

Healthcare jobs - Having a hard time believing it.

[ In Reply To ..]
I totally agree. I have went back and forth on a decision of going back to school for coding or nursing and I just couldn't do either one. For one, coding -- need I even explain myself :-). Coding is probably going to be gone as well as MT. Nursing, well, I always felt like that was the "stable" part of healthcare; however, in the past few years, many nurses have been laid off only to be replaced by newer, cheaper grads. AND I just had someone tell me the other day that hiring practices for nurses in hospitals are now trending to only hiring advanced practice nurses, BSN or MSN. Anyway, the reason that I made the switch from MA to MT was because I preferred not having dealing with direct patient care. It is just bizarre that it seems like any other "business" respects their cubicle workers but that healthcare has always looked down on the MT as if the only reason the person went into that was because they weren't smart enough to get into "real" healthcare like being a nurse, lab tech, or whatever. That is just the opposite of the way it really is -- it takes a lot of knowledge to be an MT and actually there is nothing that I can do with that knowledge now except be a nurse, which I seriously do not want to do. Unfortunately, since coding is a questionable field as well, I will be just wasting away my medical knowledge and trying to get into something else. :-( Making a career change is difficult because the current experience and connections just aren't there.

EMR - S.O.S.

[ In Reply To ..]
I copied/pasted this information:

EMR:

Because of these many "after entry" benefits, federal and state governments, insurance companies and other large medical institutions are heavily promoting the adoption of electronic medical records. Congress included a formula of both incentives (up to $44K per physician under Medicare or up to $65K over 6 years, under Medicaid) and penalties (i.e. decreased Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements for covered patients to doctors who fail to use EMR's by 2015) for EMR/EHR adoption versus continued use of paper records as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Is there an alternative? - thinkingcaps

[ In Reply To ..]
Maybe we can put our heads together and think of another way our skills can be put to use. There must be something!

What happened? - The shadow

[ In Reply To ..]
Between MQ and AHDI (who are sometimes in the political bed together) we have been destroyed and sold to the Indians. AMERICAN JOBS FOR AMERICAN WORKERS!!

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