My Nuance Story - mtgal1963

I'm not on here to bash Nuance.  I am here to tell my story ...... you take from it what you want.

I have been doing MT work for 8 years.  I have worked for several national companies.  I was EXTREMELY happy with my job and then Nuance came along and swallowed up our little transcription service just like it has done to so many others.  It was not all bad .........but most of it was. 

Nuance, to be fair, does offer 401K, medical benefits, and PTO, even to their part-time MTs.  However, my pay has dropped dramatically since they took my company over.  I used to qualify for the QA incentive, even as a part timer, but they just restructured that to where you have to exceed full time line requirements to be eligible.........that's a little tough to do on a part-time basis.  They pretty much shut the part-timers out of the QA incentive completely.  They keep saying they are "working" on putting an incentive in place for part timers but I have yet to see it or hear anything promising about it. 

I love their Escription program.  As speech programs go, it is by far the best I have used.  With that said, however, it does not give me magic powers to type 500 lph like Nuance brags about in all their demonstrations.  Yes, it is a great program.  Yes, as it gets "trained" the documents come out cleaner and cleaner with less editing required and maybe some day I can type significantly more lines but for the forseeable future, that is NOT the case.  This equates to a huge pay cut for me for quite some time.  Plus I lost my QA incentive.  I have taken an IC job part-time (traditional transcription, no speech) to supplement what I have lost since Nuance took over. 

I feel very stressed since the takeover.  I am on a constant tightrope ..... crank out lines as fast as possible to keep from losing too much money, keep accuracy at 99%, and send less than 15% to QA for review.  It is a very difficult, delicate balancing act.  The speech program misses a lot of little words (the, is, a, at, in, on) and these have to be caught by the MT and put in there or corrected, otherwise, we get dinged on our QA scores for it.  It messes up medication dosages a lot  .... again, we have to carefully watch for that and correct it, otherwise a HUGE error deduction for a patient care error. 

What's the hardest for me is "the powers that be" seem to think it is so easy to just sit  there and read along with this little red box that jumps around the screen.  It gets easier as you do it for a while but it is much harder than one might think.  And we get dinged for errors that the speech engine makes if we don't catch them and they are errors that a seasoned MT would NEVER make had he or she typed the document from scratch..... hard to stomach!

Anyway, I just wanted to give my take on the Nuance situation.  I have not made up my mind for certain that I will stay.  I am giving it a shot and 100% of my effort.  I'll see how I feel and how much money I'm making in a few months and reassess my situation.  I'm just thanful I have my IC job to fall back on and a wonderful husband with a decent income.  I would starve on Nuance's pay structure otherwise!  They don't make me feel very valued as an employee..... kinda like I'm just a "typist" and not a trained professional worthy of decent pay.

Thanks for listening