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

Why don't they just SAY they're looking for a SLAVE or a - IMANMT2

Posted: Nov 15, 2010

beck and call girl. Really.

Offering transcriptin to newbies for 0.035 a line wasn't allowered here, right? Oh wait, it's camouflaged by "per audio hour".. oh, let's do the math, shall we? :D

10 minutes of dictation can TYPICALLY generate 100 lines. that is 10 lines a voice minute or dictated minute. And you can ROUGHLY say an hour of typing per 10 minutes of dictation. ROUGHLY. Faster, slower MTs, content, shortcuts, templates, yadda yadda.

Okay... pasting now.

Pay begins at $21.00 per audio hour which averages 0.35 cents per audio minute for the newbie until off QA. (length of audio times rate = pay)

Okay, I'm back.... If you divide .35 cents (35 cents by the 10 lines) you get 0.035 per transcribed line.

And wouldn't that have been easier to say?

Maybe there should be a word limit on the ads. You know, what you'll pay, what you expect (and that could be worded like -- well, basically, we expect an employee for independent contractor pay - you know, no benefits, no taxes matched, but we want to tell you HOW to do the work anyway AND we want to control everything including when you sleep or go to the bathroom. Well, TRUTHFULLY, we'd like a slave... but that's been outlawed so we'll settle for an IC .. PREFERABLY a newbie).

You know..someone who will hang around in the work pool all day and catch the occasional stat, if there is one, and then work up into the evening/night because that's when we will finally get around to sending you the bulk of the work we want you to do. And that would be Monday through Friday ... UNLESS we need you on Saturday and Sunday, too. No, we don't really have a schedule. We just need you to be available in case we MIGHT have work for you.

Yeah, these people need to subcontract to a service for that kind of coverage. It's called staffing.

And when this ridiculous scenario fails who do they blame... the lowly MT who finally gets sick and tired of being chained to her computer for hours on end for no reason at all it sometimes turns out.

Sorry, had to vent and I only read a couple of ads. I'm nosey. I admit it. I like to come back and see what's happening. I have two accounts that are decent, you know. I get a little peeved sometimes by some crummy dictators that put everybody in a tailspin. I come here, read a few ads, and I'm ready to go back to work. Completely cured of my peevishness, well almost, it just kind of gets redirected. I try not to post, sometimes I type and then erase it. (Probably should have erased this time, too.) Sorry.

I hope I didn't upset anybody with my rant. But somebody needs to do something about that add with low line rate - I didn't know how to get in touch wtih the moderator (or I would have spared you all). And if it's a conference with 2 or more dictating in that same minute, you can kiss any money for that minute goodbye. Oh, and on THAT note... :D

can I just ask - how you get

[ In Reply To ..]
10 minutes of dictation can typically generate 100 lines?

I thought that an audio hour can be done x3, so 1 hour audio = 3 hours transcribed, or faster, I usually do 1 hour audio = 2 hours transcribed.

So, $21 per hour would be $7 if done in 3 hours or $10.50 if done in 2.

Sorry... I am so confused.

It's based on experience transcribing - no1joe

[ In Reply To ..]
When I see a job come in that's 10 minutes long, average dictator, it usually equals roughly 100 lines unless you have someone taking long pauses or answering phone calls without hitting the pause button. It's a pretty good estimate.

Thanks to the OP for breaking this down to line rate (estimate) too. The pay is dirt. Even if you break it down to $7/hour or $10.50/hour, it's still dirt (and I doubt that a new MT would be able to make the $10.50/hour unless there are A LOT of pauses or phone calls mixed in there... and it would be even LESS if you have a speed talker). I would consider her breakdown fair. My first job out of school in the mid 90s paid $14/hour; Heartland used to pay me $14/hour in 2005 while sitting with NJA!!! These companies are ridiculous and are trying to take advantage, and when people accept positions like this for dirt pay, it drags down starting offers for experienced MTs too. Thanks again to the OP. Hopefully people will read it before they send their resume. : )

My first 2 jobs were hospital on site and... - IMANMT2

[ In Reply To ..]
They had a quota they would measure our productivity by. We were on site, paid hourly, so they were more interested in jobs, dates, and being current, and hours worked and didn't care about lines transcribed. Our quota was 80 minutes in 8 hours with 2 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch.

I can listen to blah blah all day long but won't get money unless my fingers type sound for keystroke (now). And we produce typed lines. Our Transcription supervisor back then had the formula. She used it in evalauting us. She liked transcribed lines to measure work the office did daily, because we could never catch up to the volume in minutes (there wasn't enough of us and the department manager couldn't understand that). So, she would try to show we were working our tails off - skipping lunch, etc., to try and get current. (We finally had to outsource.) It is an estimate, but it's a good baseline, or average. It determined if we kept employment and/or got our annual raise of 2%. :D

I like converting to lines. I think it is a more accurate measure of the "work" that is going to be involved. Because there are pauses, and speed talkers, and pagers going off, and nurses asking questions.

I think you might find it somewhere in a How To Run an MT Business book, written down. Because I understand you are looking for the authority, the official word on it... who says. But like the poster below says, it does just come with experience.

You are fast if you can do 20 minutes of dictation (from tape quality even) in an hour consistently. I never calculate what a job might pay that high. It's a bonus if it does, but they ususally don't. There's always a trick that will slow you down.

I heard of a local hospital setting a 1200 line quota (I guess it depends on which side they look at transcription from - and I think outsourcing has helped hospital supervisors look at transcription differently, from lines produced because typically that is how they are billed) and they would let you work 10 hour days x4 or 8 hour days x5 - your choice.... After you hit the 1200-line quota they then paid .10 a line. Which is pretty sweet if you think about it. Because if you could produce 200 lines an hour you could hit your quota in 6 hours and have 2 to 4 hours left over for bonus money. That is a mix of both that I think is extremely fair for the MT and it is usually cheaper than outsourcing so the hospital wins, too.

I like counting lines versus dictated minutes and/or getting paid by the hour. I want more money, I need to increase my volume.

To be certain or to just play around with it, in your case with your work, you could count your lines. Do a Word character count with spaces and divide by 65. Word's word count is a little weird and not to be trusted, it is much bigger than a character count. Then you can see what you're producing an hour in case you ever have to gauge work billed by the line instead of an hourly rate. And take that hourly production volume in lines and multiply it by 8 cents and see if you are making more or less if you were being paid by the line.

You have to look at it from all the angles. Like the posts below, if they are getting creative with the line definition and changing up the characters that make up a line, you'll have to convert to a 65-character line to see where the pay might fall with regards to the industry standard. Which, I believe, is 8 cents per 65 characters with spaces.

And I think sometimes it is meant to be confusing.

Rate of Pay - Tara

[ In Reply To ..]
I will admit that this is not a great amount for per hour audio hour as I was paid $40 per audio hour quite a few years ago, HOWEVER, this is for a NON-MT position, which means whoever is typing the report will not have to stop and look things up. This is for a general typist - someone that needs no education. For an entry level position, $7 or $10.50 an hour is doing pretty good when taxes aren't being taken out and you get to be at home without the usual expenses of being out in the workforce. Whether or not this is good money also depends on where a person lives. This is decent money for where I'm from. Someone that has no education makes right around this mark working outside the home so if someone can make this without daycare expenses, gas, wear and tear on a vehicle, work clothes, etc. it's pretty darn good. Not to mention they are being paid for the whole file. You don't get paid for pauses, stumbles, and scratch that when paid by the line so it is an advantage that they get paid for the whole thing especially just starting out. There are no surprises with their pay. With the way MT's complain about all the ESL and not making money and how they only make minimum wage, this person could probably make more money than some MT's.

A couple of things.... - IMANMT2

[ In Reply To ..]
This is an MT site. The ad specifically asked for MT newbies.

Typing non-medical dictation might not sway an MTSO to hire you anymore than working at a convenience store or babysitting on the weekends.

Personally, I sometimes think non-medical dictation can be more difficult in that you don't know what to expect. Say in a cholecystectomy - you know the opening, the closing, the anatomy, the equipment, and if a doctor, ESL or other, blerbs a word you pretty much already know what it is supposed to be - which helps.

I don't think we had confirmed that the tape COULD be typed in 3 hours by a newbie or anybody else (having not heard it), so it would be hard to say how much money for sure could be made in what amount of time.

My point was that the offering in line rate was below this site's minimum to offer a newbie or anybody else.

Not all of my post was directed at this particular advertisement. I was on a roll. :D

"Scratch that" still takes time to correct and you still have to delete what you typed and type what they change it to.

TAXES - NOT AN ADVANTAGE that taxes aren't paid - it means you don't have the employer's contribution being paid for your FICA - you get self-employment tax. You pick up the full tab for your Social Security and Medicare. Sooooo, you would need MORE money because it is all due at the end of the year or actually quarterly.

I would really like to test out that, "this person could make more money than some MTs." Yeah, MTs getting 5 cents per line or less. Which is basically my whole point. At 5 cents if they can do 200 lines an hour that is 10 dollars an hour, entry level, or 7.50, or 5.00 an hour if they are coming in at the 100 or 150 lines an hour. Compare that to 7, 5.25, and 3.50 dollars an hour, respectively, for the same audio file at the 0.035 cents per line it works out to roughly be.

To be sure, you would just have to see how the work goes and what you end up making for what amount of work/time you have to spend to get the money.

so you finally got a job tara? - mt

[ In Reply To ..]
looks like you found a position! COngrats!

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