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

Interview for Research Paper - kgm

Posted: Mar 02, 2015

Would anyone be willing to give me a quick interview? Questions include: How did you get into field? Why did this field appeal to you? Does it meet with your satisfaction? Years of employment and level of responsibility?

Input - Dotts

[ In Reply To ..]
1. How I got into the field of MT: More than 25 years ago, I worked in a Medical Records Dept. of a hospital. Our Director asked everyone in the department (some 40 people) to cross-train on another job in the department for coverage and I picked medical transcription and received paid on-the-job training by well-experienced women.

2. Why this field appealed to me: Some 25 years ago, we were paid an hourly wage and I found the work very interesting; took me a good three years to feel comfortable doing it. Also, the pay was good. If I did not know a medical word or the meaning of the word, procedure, etc., I researched it and memorized it - again, took a good three years.

Does it meet with my satisfaction: Really not any more because I absolutely loathe voice recognition. Used to like thinking my way through a report; now we are more or less "robots" with nothing really to think about - it's all about speed and productivity - and quality has gone out the window.

Years of employment: 20 years as an executive or administrative secretary; over 25 years as medical transcriptionist.

Many thanks - Kgm

[ In Reply To ..]
Thank you so much. Tremendously helpful.

my response - EX-mmodal EX-MT, Never Will Work This Profession A

[ In Reply To ..]
How did you get into field?
I too worked in Medical Records while I was in college. I made friends with girls a little older than me making three times as much as I did transcribing with an incentive program. I liked to type, I was smart, and I begged the Director to train me. I was put in a two year training program at a top notch oncology hospital.

Why did this field appeal to you?

Pretty much answered above. But what drove the appeal was the natural progression of in-house going to outsource to small MTSO, work from home, tapes delivered in the a.m. and picked up 24 hours later and I set my own schedule. In the early 1990s, I easily made over 50,000 a year, set my own schedule and loved it (although self-employment tax was a bitch)

Does it meet with your satisfaction? Absolutely no longer. Years ago I tried to rally this primarily female profession as I saw the BRIGHT NEON WRITING ON THE WALL, as the small MTSOs were gobbled up by larger MTSOs and then those were gobbled up by Software companies (which is exactly what Mmodal, Nuance, et al are...tech companies..NOT medical transcription companies)...in any case, I tried to rally women it was time to form collective bargaining groups and women being women..and I am sorry here..but are stupid and refuse to stand up for their own worth. So MTSOs (really software companies) still raking in fees for providing transcribed reports because much to their frustration, VR is way off what they thought it would be by now and they STILL have to put up with..as they see it..a bunch of middle-aged frumpy typists to correct the horrendous reports. They zero respect for the talent and skill it takes to interpret a complex medical report (although I could be up to speed inside a week to manage their company)

Years of employment and level of responsibility? I worked as an MT for over 20 years. I had no desire to go into management, especially with the way these companies are run and the revolving door of middle management, QAs, etc.

I happily took my vast medical knowledge and made it work in the non-clinical medical field in another profession.

research input - rock bottom

[ In Reply To ..]
Started in 1975 at a teaching hospital. Trained myself with a Dorland's dictionary and a lot of previous experience in other areas (nurse aide, etc and Latin and Greek in English course in college. Way way long before internet. Read extensively.

Pay was decent, turnaround time was reasonable. Overtime was at times ridiculous because very very few people knew how to do this and it was at that time all on the job training, pretty much train yourself.

Quit in 1987 for another career, audiology, which I like better, but there are no jobs around here and I bought a house which is now 25% under water.

Started back in 2005 online. Worked for a great company. They were bought by a bigger company who knew nothing at all about transcription whatsoever. They sold to another company at which point I worked for the long distance telephone company of the Philippines. They ran the company into the ground, ran off all the accounts, we ran out of work, I jumped ship to another small company.

Loved it. All onshore (United States Transcriptionists only). High quality work, fairly good pay. Nice place to work.

That company was bought by another mega MTSO. Then came the slide down into sweat shop existence. This company knows absolutely nothing at all whatsoever about transcription. Nothing. They know a lot about software, but not enough to make it work right. Their goal is to get rid of the people and have machines do all the work. To that end, they have hired way more administration to get more production out of the few people producing. To put it bluntly, they are so top heavy (2/3 administration, 1/3 production) that they cannot get the production completed within the required guidelines as stated in the contracts. So, I suspect they will soon be losing accounts. (Exactly what the previous company did that no longer exists).

I used to love this work. Taking pride, making sure my reports were top notch. At one hospital I worked at back in the 1980s, some doctors would look see who did the document and if the initials were mine, they would simply sign it, knowing that if there was anything wrong, I would leave a blank, draw to their attention.

What has happened to the field is that The large MTSOs think that their software is great, their speech recognition is superb, and their audio file conversions are studio quality.

Not. Not. and Not. Therefore, the quality suffers miserably. The MLS spend excessive amounts of time on poor to very poor quality audio files, pulling down production. That is what I mean by this company knows absolutely nothing about transcription. It is 99% good audio quality, and the 1% qualified MLS that makes it right.

So to fund their software, this year I took a $700 per month pay cut. I now make in 2015 what I made in 1980 so that they can have their software programs, their administration, and money cover their fines when the work is not returned in time.

Within the next 15 years, there will not be many MLS left. At that time, the bean counters will have realized what a very serious mistake it was to have providers doing their own reports (lawsuits after lawsuits will happen, I absolutely guarantee it). Then, the whole field will be revamped to bring back the MLS, have real people at least checking reports to avoid the mega lawsuits. But we will all be retired. The younger ones will have moved on to more lucrative fields.

It was a nice field. You cannot make a living at it now. You can make better money in fast food or general clerk. Good enough job to get you medical insurance but that is about it now.

We have auditors who decide minor errors like putting in the word an or leaving out the word an are so critical that patient safety is at risk and the patient might be harmed or could actually have died by this 'error.' The purpose of that is just to reduce our pay to minimum wage.

We also have software programs that don't save our work, and 'errors' are attributed to us, when the software did not save the changes we made.

This is what happens when companies who know nothing whatsoever about transcription start doing transcription.

Very similar response to Dotts'. - MUPpuppy. sm

[ In Reply To ..]
Only differences: Worked as a secretary at a rehab center for about 5 years. MTing was part of the job. Moved onto full-time acute MTing thereafter (25+ years).

I love (and am good at), typing, researching medical/science-y things, and medical terminology. And I got paid well to do all that. Truly enjoyed my job back then.

It no longer satisfying to me. The fun of researching is frowned upon. Dotts is spot on: "...it's all about speed and productivity," and being robots.

Some answers: - Feral MT

[ In Reply To ..]
Q: How did you get into field?
A: I pretty much stumbled into it back in 1975. I was bouncing from job to job, not really finding a "fit". Didn't like office politics, or having to work with chauvinistic male salesmen all the time. Someone I knew who did MT let me come into her office at the hospital and try to transcribe a couple of reports. I obviously didn't know what I was doing, but I liked it. So I went to night school for a semester and got a job at a very small MT service (only about 10 transcribers) in 1976.

Q: Why did this field appeal to you?
A: It appealed to me because it was something I was naturally good at. I was also kind of shy back in the '70s (I later outgrew that!), so liked working with cassette tapes instead of face-to-face with the public. Also, back then there was lots of job security. I knew I could move anywhere in the country, and I would find work easily.

Q: Does it meet with your satisfaction?
A: It did from 1976 through about 1993. Pay kept going up, job security was still there, and my work was respected by the places I worked. Unfortunately, after 1993, an HMO had taken over our hospital, our job became more specialized and pigeonholed into just one thing - transcription. No more secretarial duties. The HMO was constantly looking to cut costs, and during the next decade, MT went from being a secure, non-stress job to being very insecure and stressful. When we all got laid off and outsourced, and I ended up working for an MTSO (could no longer find in-house work anywhere), the pay dropped so sharply that I went from being a self-sufficient, middle-class, white-collar worker to being poor and on county assistance.

Q: Years of employment and level of responsibility?
A: Total years of being an MT, at various types of MT jobs: 37 years. The highest level of responsibility was when the MT job was still called a "medical secretary". I was responsible for all the transcription in my department, all the Dictaphones in the department (monitoring, repair and upkeep), various files of studies some of the physicians did, meeting minutes from the department, light phone work, manuscript typing, and transport of patient charts throughout the hospital.

Eventually it became strictly transcription, nothing else. In order to continue to do manuscripts and papers for the doctors, I had to do it on the sly, on my own time, and they had to pay me directly. Finally, as the employee of an MTSO, we went to speech recognition, and I no longer even transcribed. I just sat and watched a little red cursor move as I listed to dictation, occasionally typing in a comma, a period, an "and" or a "the". They called this numbing boredom "editing".

Finally, last year even editing went away, the work dried up entirely, and I and all of the MTs where I worked were laid off. I'm still unemployed.

kgm last I knew was a COM in the Nuance food chain - wonder if there are two?

[ In Reply To ..]
That would be an odd coincidence.

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