Medical Transcriptionist Training

Medical Transcriptionist: An Overview

Medical Transcription is an up and coming field in the medical profession. According to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Statistics, the employment of medical transcriptionists is expected to grow faster than average for all other occupations through year 2014. Authorities are of the view that this surge in demand will be a direct effect of a growing and ageing population.

There are many people who want to find out what is this new field about. Here we discuss the various aspects of information in regards with this profession.

Who is a Medical Transcriptionist?

Medical transcriptionists, generally referred to as MT, work with doctors and health care professionals. Their job is to listen to voice recorded material and write it in the form of medical reports and other documents. MTs are hospital employees who may work from home or they could be independent contractors that the hospital may hire on project basis. The documents or reports an MT produces eventually become part of patients' files and history in the hospital records.

A Career in Medical Transcription: As per US employment market estimates, the jobs for medical transcriptionists stood at well over 100,000 in the year 2008. Out of all MTs employed, 36% worked in some hospital, 23% worked in physicians' offices, while the rest worked for laboratories, in business support services, outpatient care centers, therapists' and audiologists' offices.

Another option that some medical transcriptionists take is working from home. This is especially suitable for stay at home parents with small children. There are schools that even provide online medical transcriptionist training to cater to the needs of this segment.

Requirements to Become a Medical Transcriptionist: The first and foremost requirement for a medical transcriptionist include complete know-how and understanding of medical terminology as well as the working knowledge of various medical fields of study like physiology, anatomy, pharmacology etc. They also need to have the ability to comprehend abbreviation and convert them into the full form of words. They also need to be able to understand shorthand and dictation. While it is understood that medical transcriptionists will take support from the reference material, it is expected that they stick to specific standards in terms of the style of medical reports.

A medical transcriptionist should also be adaptable to the changes in technologies and new developments. This is because while these transcriptionists' work is usually based on recorded tapes and CDs, more recently, there has been the inclusion of the speech recognition software also. With this advent in technology, medical transcriptionists are now expected to more closely read, edit, punctuate and properly interpret the information recorded by software. Hence it is also imperative for a medical transcriptionist to be a great editor and proofreader.

Medical Transcriptionist Training

In order to become a great medical transcriptionist, a person must have the ability to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant information. They shouldn't only be able to recognize the terms and abbreviations used, but also should be able to actually understand them. And all of this can only come from a thorough training background in the field of medical transcription.

There is a wide variety of certificate training programs offered to those wanting to become medical transcriptionists. You can opt for either a certificate course of 1 year duration or an associate degree of two years. These training programs primarily focus on inducing complete understanding of medical terminology and phrases. In addition to this, another thing that they focus is the common slang that healthcare professionals may use for particular terms.

Medical Transcriptionist training programs are also offered online for the purposes of convenience and to facilitate long distance learning, both. Care must be taken in order to find a good, legitimate MT training program.

How to find a Good Medical Transcriptionist Training Program?

If you need to find a legitimate training program for Medical Transcriptionist, the best way is to contact your local community schools and vocational training institutes. According to the US government rules and regulations, these training programs need to be accredited by AACP or Approval Committee for Certificate Programs. The AACP is an entity established by the AHDI (Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity) and the AHIMA (American Health Information Management Association. It is only after completing an accredited program that you can become an RMT (Registered Medical Transcriptionist) or a CMT (Certified Medical Transcriptionist).

Medical Transcription Equipment: The most commonly used standard for both doctors and transcriptionists is cassette recordings. The doctor or the healthcare professional records into a handheld mini tape recorder which is then transcribed by an MT. Sometimes doctors use a digital voice recorder. The main difference between the two formats is basically the ease of operations. While tape recorded cassettes have to be physically sent to the medical transcriptionist or picked up by them, the digital recording can simply be copied and sent via email to the MT. Based on the format used for recording, the medical transcription equipment differs. But two things you will always need are headphones and a foot pedal.

For cassette transcription, you have to attach the foot pedal and the headphones are attached to the transcriber, which in turn is attached to your computer. But in the case of digital recording, the foot pedal needs to be plugged into the serial port of the transcriptionist's computer and the headphones are to be attached to your speakers.  

Medical Transcriptionist Salary: The salaries in the field of Medical Transcription vary greatly. This makes it quite difficult to come up with true statistics of earnings. However, the salary of a Medical Transcriptionist depends upon a number of factors. These include the experience and reputation of the MT in the marketplace, freelance vs. employed status, your negotiation skills and so on. While an employed medical transcriptionist may have lesser earnings than a freelance transcriptionist, the latter's earnings may vary from periods of assignments to periods of no assignments.

According to careful estimates, medical transcriptionists earn anywhere between $12,000 per year to over $50,000 per year.