How Technology Killed the Medical Transcription Field - Amanda

I wrote this essay about the negative impact VR and outsourcing has had on this field. I thought you guys might appreciate it.

HOW TECHNOLOGY KILLED THE MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTION FIELD

Long before I began working as a medical transcriptionist in 1993, others had been making a good living in the field for many years. For those unaware, medical transcriptionists (sometimes referred to as medical language specialists) are responsible for producing patients' medical records.

Listening through a set of headphones, we transcribe (decipher and type) what physicians, nurses and physician assistants dictate on the other end of the line. We are the unseen faces behind every patient's medical chart.

Once a respectable, enjoyable and even lucrative field, medical transcription has devolved into a technological sweatshop. Not only have wages remained stagnant since the new millennium, but the introduction of voice recognition has actually reduced wages by nearly one-half.

Pitched as a software wonder that allows MTs to increase their productivity, VR attempts to capture spoken speech and reproduce the chart. Today's MT is little more than a proofreader, what the industry refers to as a voice recognition editor.

Rather than typing what we hear and ensuring its accuracy, we now go behind the VR and clean up its mistakes. And usually there are lots of mistakes, so many that it is often more productive to erase the chart and type it from scratch.

Aside from the frustration, and dare I say humiliation, of "training" the software to do our jobs for us, today's MT has seen her wages drastically reduced. Industry leaders claim this is because the VR is actually doing most of the work and, as such, we should be able to produce twice as many charts. But that is not the reality.

To reiterate my point, it takes most MTs longer to do a VR report than it does to transcribe the chart herself. And that's assuming there is any work to do. Like so many American companies these days, medical transcription is not immune to outsourcing. In fact, the practice has become increasingly common over the last few years, namely sending work to India.

Perhaps it's a result of our poor economy, or simply a result of executive greed, yet whatever the reason, most MTs would agree that they have witnessed a growing depletion of available work. And if we don't have work to produce, we don't get paid.

While most transcription services once compensated their employees with downtime when the work ran out (which was quite rare), those days are history. Today's climate is one of harsh indifference. MTs are at best a cheap means to increase company profits, at worst computer janitors tasked with cleaning up the software mess.

Despite all this, there are still plenty of transcription courses being offered for those individuals hoping to enter the field. So too are there companies that actively recruit new MTs.

Yet anyone considering a job in this field would do better waiting tables or flipping burgers. Don't be fooled into thinking otherwise. Medical transcription is dead. This is its eulogy.