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.
My home-based co-workers and I, about 20 of us, occasionally attend staff meetings on-site at the hospital. At 14+ years of employment here, I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack when comes to on-the-job longevity.
Some of us now approach these meetings with increasing apprehension: Will this be the day when we'll find pink slips waiting for us because all transcription will be outsourced, not just the "backlog"? Or an announcement will be made that SR finally is being implemented, and we can choose to either learn it quickly and cope with reduced production pay or try our luck somewhere else?
Business decisions like this are made every day. And despite the impact on individual employees, they're not made with the intention of ratcheting up their anxiety levels.
I'm wondering if some of us (and I'm looking in the mirror, here) have waited just a touch too long before paying real attention to what's happening in MT outside our protected bubble (hello, offshore impact?) and the potential for the EMR/EHR to turn everything upside down.
Not long ago, I hit my personal nadir when it came to thinking about the rest of my working life and the fact that much as I'd love to retire from my present company, it's by no means a sure thing. I'm at least eight years from retirement age, and in the current business environment that's a long time.
After a short-lived experimental foray into SR editing for a MTSO that was intended to be a part-time gig and ended up as a sad new personal record for bagging a job, my thoughts were "great, I'm too young to retire and too old to start over. I need to keep this household afloat which means I need to continue making about what I'm making now, and what in the heck am I going to do if/when this job goes away before I'm ready?"
After a brief pity party for myself, I put a lid on that line of thinking and realized that the answer was implicit in the question. What am I going to do? GET ready.
I'll keep this job as long as I can, but I'm also going to tune back into what's happening in this industry. That free subscription to Advance our supervisor recommended, which I thumbed through just to find articles relating to my narrow MT world and wrote off the rest as boring or confusing? Reading it cover-to-cover now, and not waiting for the hardcopy in my mailbox; nope, it's one of the web sites I routinely check these days, along with ForTheRecord and other reliable HIM sources. I've sought out the MT voices who have kept their fingers on the pulse of changes in healthcare documentation, and I'm reading their blogs.
I'm also looking at taking some classes. And, heaven help me, renewing my long-lapsed AHDI membership.
I can't afford to be a lone ranger any more, with a vague sense that changes are coming down the pike but hoping to just keep my head down and somehow stay under the radar. When the inevitable changes in what I do, how I do it, who I do it for, and how I get paid for it eventually land on my doorstep, I want to be prepared with some realistic sense of where I fit into the picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment