Great! MM wants to change how we get paid. - End of the line = DEATH

“Line count” as a metric has remained popular because consumers are familiar with it and also because we (MTSOs – Medical Transcription Service Organizations) are able to use it to our advantage. As the cost of labor has risen over the past decades, we’ve added technology to reduce the amount of labor needed, and thus we’ve been able to keep the price (per line) low.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!  COST OF LABOR HAS RISEN??  IT REALLY MEANS THE COST OF CORPORATE'S NEW HOMES. 

It seems inevitable that billing for dictation/transcription must move to a different metric. There are at least two candidates: data points and minutes. By “data points,” I mean a scheme where the customer is charged based on the number of pieces of data returned. When I say “minutes,” I am referring to using the length of the dictation as the metric for billing.

With minutes, we already have an analog that we are familiar with – mobile phones. Dictation minutes could be sold in the same way that mobile minutes are sold, and that would give consumers an easy way to compare prices between vendors.

Also, billing by the minute is perhaps the best way to match effort with cost.

Whenever I talk with people about this idea, I typically hear these two questions:

Q: If you bill by the minute, won’t the providers talk really fast?

A: Ask any transcriber, they already talk fast! They talk fast because their time is valuable, but most providers know that if they want to get good quality information back, they have to slow it down enough to be understood. Keep in mind that when people pay for minutes on their mobile phone, that does not usually cause them to speak faster. People just figure out what they need, and they buy that many minutes.

Q: How can a vendor/transcriber figure out how to set prices using minutes?

A: We have the historical data. We have documents and sound files galore – so we can find the average number of lines per minute and use that as a starting point.

In my research, I have found that if we were to take the average lines per minute calculation and make that change, some of the clients would pay less than they do now and some would pay more. Most would pay about the same as they do now.

In the real world, I believe that an MTSO would have to begin offering per minute pricing to new customers while allowing their existing clients to remain on their current plan. The per-minute pricing can then be presented to existing clients, allowing them to opt-in, and then eventually a date would be set to move all clients over. This whole process might take a year or even two years, and of course, there would be a cost in making a transition like this. In the end, the MTSO will have a system that more accurately reflects the effort required and would be fairer to the actual transcribers (who normally get paid based on lines now), and consumers will have an easy and accurate metric that they can use when comparison shopping for vendors.

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