Medical Transcription: I Have No Letters...

There are many reasons why someone would want to become a Medical Transcriptionist!

It is an absolutely critical element of quality health care, as every time a patient is seen by his or her physician notes on that visit are placed in the patient's medical records. Accurate transcription of the doctor's dictation is vital in portraying the patient's medical condition, especially if he or she should be referred to a different physician.

Some of the reasons you might consider becoming a transcriptionist are: It is an extremely vital skill needed by the medical community, and will be for the foreseeable future, it is continually interesting, one may build one's own transcription service, and there is a potential to work out of the home.
Other reasons include, but are not limited to:

1. Medical transcription is a critical and honorable profession.


2. There is an ongoing need. The current population of medical transcriptionists is aging and retiring. There are not enough transcriptionists entering the field to keep up with the demand. And guess what? People continue to go to the doctor!


3. There is the potential to work from home, either as an employee or an independent contractor.


4. There is the potential to build your own business with an income limited only by your willingness to work hard.


5. The work is continually and endlessly interesting.

It's been said that the United States is the best place in the world to be if you are sick. One of the reasons for that is that we have quality transcriptionists making sure the details of every doctor's visit is accurately entered into a patient's medical records.

Hospitals have entire staffs dedicated to transcribing everything from an Emergency Room visit for a sprained toe, to detailed workups for open-heart surgery. Any kind of medical procedure you can think of, someone is transcribing it somewhere.

What would happen to the level of care in our country if we did not have fast, reliable transcriptionists keeping those records up to date? Many more mistakes would be made than are now, that's for sure. If a physician doesn't have the latest information about a patient in his or her records, he or she will not be making an informed diagnosis or prescription.

Transcriptionists help ensure that we continue to have the best health care in the world.

According to the U.S. Government Dept. of Labor, the need for transcriptionists to be greater than for other occupations up through 2016: "Employment of medical transcriptionists is projected to grow 14 percent from 2006 to 2016, faster than the average for all occupations. Demand for medical transcription services will be spurred by a growing and aging population. Older age groups receive proportionately greater numbers of medical tests, treatments, and procedures that require documentation. A high level of demand for transcription services also will be sustained by the continued need for electronic documentation that can be shared easily among providers, third-party payers, regulators, consumers, and health information systems. Growing numbers of medical transcriptionists will be needed to amend patients' records, edit documents from speech recognition systems, and identify discrepancies in medical reports."

I see the need for transcriptionists to continue until two things happen, neither of which I believe will happen very soon: First, voice recognition (VR) technology must progress far beyond its present level, and second, the vast majority of physicians must adopt that technology.

Voice recognition technology is still in its infancy. We have continually tried the latest and greatest offerings by the software companies. Our experience is that even for a person who has a great deal of time and energy to devote, the process of getting the VR software to understand him or her with a high degree of accuracy is nearly impossible. Unless the person is very careful to enunciate clearly, and also consciously limits the vocabulary in the dictation, there are going to be a lot of mistakes.

And every person who wishes to use the VR software must spend the time to get the system configured to their voice. Physicians are always overworked as it is; most simply will not spend the effort currently required to get the dang thing to work for them.
Then there are the issues of vocabulary and accent. Each medical discipline comes complete with its own list of terms that the VR software would need to be able to understand. The doctor would have to teach each and every word to the software - tedious and time-consuming work to say the least.

Also, in our melting pot of a society, a large percentage of doctors come from some other country than the United States. Since the software comes from the factory pre-configured to understand a Mid-Western U.S. accent, all those doctors will have a devil of a time getting the VR software to work properly for them.

Once VR technology progresses sufficiently to allow true ease of use, a majority of physicians must actually start using the software for there to be a significant impact on job opportunities in the Transcription world. The funny thing is, many physicians are surprisingly reluctant to embrace technology.

For example, even though digital voice recording devices are readily available and the Internet provides the ability for someone half a world away to transcribe for the physician, many still stubbornly cling to dictating into handheld cassette tape recorders, forcing the transcriptionist to deal with tape slowdowns, broken tapes, mangled tapes, you name it.

The Dept. of Labor agrees, saying, "Contracting out transcription work overseas and advancements in speech recognition technology are not expected to significantly reduce the need for well-trained medical transcriptionists. Outsourcing transcription work abroad to countries such as India, Pakistan, Philippines, and the Caribbean has grown more popular as transmitting confidential health information over the Internet has become more secure; however, the demand for overseas transcription services is expected only to supplement the demand for well-trained domestic medical transcriptionists. In addition, reports transcribed by overseas medical transcription services usually require editing for accuracy by domestic medical transcriptionists before they meet U.S. quality standards.

Speech-recognition technology allows physicians and other health professionals to dictate medical reports to a computer that immediately creates an electronic document. In spite of the advances in this technology, the software has been slow to grasp and analyze the human voice and the English language, and the medical vernacular with all its diversity. As a result, there will continue to be a need for skilled medical transcriptionists to identify and appropriately edit the inevitable errors created by speech recognition systems, and to create a final document."

It will be quite a while before transcriptionists need to start looking for another line of work. Even after the advent of voice recognition or other program designed to eliminate transcriptionists, there will always be a need for editors. No physician or other health care provider is going to have the time or the inclination to sit and edit his or her own work, or make sure it is in a form appropriate to become a legal document in a medical record.

The interest level of this work is fantastic! If you are the type of person who likes to watch the medical reality shows, this is the stuff for you!

Each report is a naked look into someone's medical condition; the symptoms they are experiencing now, how they got to where they are, what the prognosis is, and the prescribed treatment for them. And you will see the same patient come back to the doctor over and over again, so you can follow their progress. You might think you wouldn't remember each patient, but there are those you DO remember, and sometimes can even develop some empathy for them.

Each report is different from every other, since every patient is different from every other. It's fascinating to see how two people can have ostensibly the same condition, yet their different physical makeups can cause very different symptoms to appear.

Since you would probably be in the field for several years, the chances are fairly great that you would migrate from one specialty area to another over time. If you get bored, learning the new terminology of a new specialty will shake you up every time - not to mention the idiosyncrasies of a new doctor's speaking patterns.

How would you like to be learning the terminology of neurosurgery while at the same time trying to decipher the speaking patterns of a doctor who just came to this country from, say, Thailand? If that doesn't hold your interest, I don't know what will!