Changing Focus and Catching Up

Ever get the feeling that you're always just a couple of steps behind the power curve, a day late and a dollar short, jogging along at the back of the pack, perennially playing catch-up?

That would be me.

I hear about a writing contest that's right in my wheelhouse ... only to find I've missed the deadline by mere hours.

I get too busy to check my e-mail one day ... and miss the "today only!" bargain on something I really want (with free shipping!), or find that all available seats on a time-limited airfare deal have been snatched up.

For that matter, I hear a great new song on the car radio, come home and tell my 30-something daughter about it .. and she gently tells me that this song was released last year, she's downloaded it, and it's been her cell phone ringtone for months.

So it came as no surprise to me that, once I pulled my head out of the sand with respect to what's been happening in the healthcare documentation world for the last few years and tuned back in, I've missed some opportunities.

The Name Game for MTs: Time to Decide

For MTs like me, in the process of re-assessing our skill set and knowledge base to figure out how and where we fit into the changing face of healthcare documentation, the answer to "what's in a name?" deserves careful consideration.

We've had various titles before, of course, but it was largely matter of preference whether to be known as a medical transcriptionist or a medical language specialist. The latter had a nice ring to it, and some of us chose the appellation on that basis alone.

It seems that while we readily adopted "transcriptionist" to set our skills and knowledge apart (accurately) from secretaries, typists, etc., most of us became medical language specialists only when we spiffed up our resumes or introduced ourselves at cocktail parties.

As it turns out, even if the majority of MTs had become MLS(s? Where's that BOS when I need it?) and HR analysts had backed that up, we'd be due for another look at this today regardless.

ESL dictation? Bring It.

When medical transcriptionists –whether seasoned, or newly graduated – get together and “talk shop”, it's almost a given that someone will bring up ESL dictation… and everyone else will nod, groan, and roll their eyes.

ESL: English as a second language. In medical transcription it's defined as dictation by individuals who speak other languages in addition to English, and whose accents (and often syntax) are colored by their native tongues.

Here's a thought to consider: There's almost no such thing as UN-accented English, even from native speakers. It's largely a subjective call. One's perception of whether or not a speaker has an "accent” has less to do with the speaker's region of origin than one's own. In any case, it can't be assumed that dictation from a physician born and raised in the USA is going to be any easier to decipher than that of his colleague who immigrated from Kenya or Pakistan or Brazil. 

Case in point: My introduction to medical transcription. Here's the story.

Still Transcribing After All These Years

I do acute care medical transcription, and I'm good at it.

From Tuesday through Saturday every week I log onto my VPN and download the first of the day's available dictation files into my queue, entering the "zone" where my fingers key what my ears hear and my eyes verify, over and over, at an average speed of about 300 lines an hour. It's straight typing at this point, augmented with an abbreviation expander and a few macros, and the mechanics of how I do my job haven't substantially changed in over a decade and a half. We haven't yet implemented speech recognition (SR) editing. I am still a home-based hospital employee.

In the current medical transcription world, I'm considered fortunate. I have a job with benefits; my per-line production pay rate is above the national average; I don't have to deal with SR editing (yet); and I haven't been outsourced (yet).

If I didn't give occasional thought to the fact that all of this could change in a heartbeat, though, I'd be kidding myself.