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What would be a reasonable hourly wage for a medical transcriptionist of 12.5 years? - Mel

Posted: Nov 30, 2012

Hi:

I have worked for the same hospital for 12.5 years, so there is a lot of loyalty there. I live in a southern state in the USA. I get paid an hourly pay plus $0.47 incentive for anything over 90 minutes. My hourly pay to me is low, but not below $10.00 an hour. Is 20.00 per hour appropriate or am I wrong? Thanks in advance for the advice.

PS: I am not here for a debate just want to know what is a good hourly pay for 12.5 years.

Thanks,

Mel

Good luck getting that - most are minimum wage now

[ In Reply To ..]
It am not saying it should be that way, but it is that way. I used to average $32 per hour when I was paid 10 cents a line. Now, I average $12 an hour editing for 4 cpl. By the way, I have been here 17 years, same company...

Be happy with what you have.

This is what I got when being paid hourly - anon

[ In Reply To ..]
I made $14 in a hospital setting and $16.50 working in an orthopedic clinic.

Better benefits at the hospital than the clinic.

Wish I could go back to those days but both jobs were eliminated.

in your dreams - try half that

[ In Reply To ..]
Sure $20 would be a great hourly rate. If you can find it grab it! but more likely it will be much less than that, and experience doesn't seem to play much of a part anymore.

A couple of questions - just for clarity - so I can maybe give you an accurate answer. - Des

[ In Reply To ..]
You said you're working for a hospital, but what kind of work are you doing, i.e. acute care, clinic (multispecialty, single specialty, surgery only), radiology, pathology?

Are those 12-1/2 years full-time years?

How big is your hospital? Acute care experience from a 20-bed hospital isn't the same as acute-care experience from a 500-bed hospital. The larger facility will have a much larger variety of specialties, surgeries, dictators, etc., that provides the MT with a much broader experience level, thus that MT is worth much more money.

Only very few MTs are averaging $20 anymore, and only MTs who are still working for hospitals are being paid by the hour. We're paid by the line, and the going rate is 4 cpl (cents per line) for editing VR/ASR (speech recognition). Straight transcription (ST) jobs are getting fewer and farther between, and if you get one, it'll only pay about 8-9 cpl.

Again, this is just for clarity. There are so very many different levels/types of MT, and this does affect pay rates.

with 12.5 years experience working for a hospital - a good hourly rate would be..

[ In Reply To ..]
anywhere from $14 to $16 per hour considering you are paid incentive.

Where I worked, I had been there 10+ years and made $15 an hour but with my incentive it brought me up to about $20 per hour.

I live in Cali, and when I worked on site, I used - to make $23/hour. I wish I still did.

[ In Reply To ..]
Those days are sure long gone.

hourly pay - Mel

[ In Reply To ..]
Acute Care: I type all dictation worktypes except for plastic surgery and pathology.
I worked at the hospital full time for 12.5 years.
The hospital has 175 beds.

Okay... - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
The going lph rates are 4 cpl for VR and 8-9 cpl for ST, and probably at the very least 90% of your work will be VR, so you can expect to average about 5 cpl overall.

It sounds like your experience is good, but how much you will make will depend on how well you can edit/transcribe thousands of random dictators (including about 50% ESLs) from dozens of random hospitals all over the country.

I'm not kidding about the random dictators. When I worked for MedQuist (MModal), I had "acquired" 30 clients in 2 months just to keep work trickling in. And in 3 months, that was up to 40 clients, and it kept going up from there.

"Client" can mean 1 hospital alone or multiple hospitals within 1 health system, and those clients can come to you from all over the country, so that means looking up nursing home names, city names, hospice names, doctor names, local business names/people, etc., for every single report. And this is on top of looking up client specs for every report, as they're all going to be different, and if you don't follow them accurately, youâ��ll get errors marked, which reduces your score and can affect any incentive pay you might receive, or get you fired.

Also, the definition of â��downtimeâ�� is vastly different in MTSO world than what it was when I worked locally. Looking up stuff, clerical work of any kind, adding patient demographic info, reviewing client AND dictator specs, etc., is NOT considered downtime with MTSOs. They say we get paid for this work in our line rates, so the more of this stuff you have to do, the less money youâ��ll make.

As far as incentive pay, when I worked for a hospital, I got incentive pay out the wazoo, but when I got outsourced to MedQuist(MModal), I found I couldn't produce what I could at the local hospital, simply because of all the random stuff I was having to stop and do, like what I mentioned above.

If you're averaging about 250 lph now, and you can do that when you get to the MTSO, you'll make about $12.50/hr (5 cpl x 250 lph). I think this is about the average.

In my state... - Bear

[ In Reply To ..]
we have a state/gov website that tells the highs and lows for all occupations. In my state it says that $14.54 is the low and $18.28 is the high. I live in a midwestern state.

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