Medical Transcription – A Future Prospect

BPO, a term that brings to mind people with headphones glued to their workstations trying to satisfy customers with endless queries, would be but the natural perspective of this job.  That is but just a miniscule of the endless job opportunities brought to us by the BPO industry.  In today’s world where BPO is becoming one of the major sources of providing career options to a lot of young and dynamic individuals, medical transcription is one such BPO industry which attracts people with a flair for a challenging career and attention to great detail.

Medical transcription saw its inception in India around the mid 90’s and since then it has been a rapidly growing industry with flexible work patterns including working from home or on a part-time basis.  So what is really medical transcription?  Starting out my career as a medical transcriptionist, one thing I realized in my first few years into the job was that the term medical transcription is often confused with a Medical Representative, from my personal experience, when I had to tell some people I am a medical transcriptionist, the instant reaction was “Doesn’t it bother you to realize you will be traveling all your life?”  Well, for those who do not know about medical transcription, it has nothing to do with being a Medical Representative.  Medical transcription is a healthcare industry based on insurance and where detailed medical records are needed for processing insurance claims.

Unlike in India where we pay directly to the healthcare providers, i.e., at hospitals where a consulting fee is charged before seeing a medical practitioner, in most other countries, citizens are covered by medical insurance.  They get the desired service from the doctor and their insurance provider is the one who is responsible for providing the physician the remuneration for the services rendered.  So in order for the doctor to get his reimbursement, he needs a medical record, practically comprising of everything that happened between the provider and the patient and submit it to the insurance authorities to get paid.  The doctor dictates patient reports as voice files and transfers the voice files through internet to the company’s server where the medical transcriptionist downloads the voice file, listens to it, types it, proofreads the document and submits to the client in an error-free state.  Most of the medical transcription jobs are outsourced to India from US, some from UK but a major bulk of the work comes from US, of course because we have 12-1/2 hours advantage over them and because we work cheap according to them!

The two major aspects of the transcription industry are quality and TAT (turn around time).  Each document or transcript should meet the quality criteria as desired by the client usually 100% according to them, but according to practical and humanely possible standards, an overall accuracy of 98.5% or above.  TAT or Turn Around Time is the time limit specified by the client to complete a given job.  It can vary anywhere from 48 hours to 1 hour or less.  It is very important to keep these two aspects in mind if you wish your career to find growth.

Basically, to start with, to be a medical transcriptionist, you need to have good command over English and good listening skills.  It comprises of a six-month training program, where you will be given an overview of what an actual doctor has to study in his career, (yes its true, at the end of training, I quite felt like a doctor myself!), a brush-up on your language skills (mostly grammatical refreshers and getting used to the foreign accent), and getting yourself acquainted with basic computer knowledge.  The medicine theory part will consist of study of human anatomy, different diseases associated with each organ systems, the treatments and so on.  Of course, there will be several reference materials for researching medical terminologies and drug names used for treatments so that we do not end up discovering a new disease or inventing a new drug.  A wrong drug dosage error in a document can cause a poor doctor his practice and the company a very bad reputation.

Being a medical transcriptionist is far from easy, you need to be updated about the advancements in healthcare industry.  Every day is a day of learning because you never know what side of the bed the doctor is going to wake up on.  Sure, it is tough, a doctor dictating with bad voice quality or in tremendous speed can turn your days into living hell.  Still, medical transcription is so to speak one of the most highly paid jobs in BPO industry.  It is the only job where the employee can decide on how much money he wants to make for the month (the faster your fingers move, the wealthier you become).  Transcripts or files are usually word documents and the amount of work a person does daily is calculated in lines, i.e., the total number of lines in a document.  Salary is calculated on the basis of number of lines you do per day.  The more you do, the heavier your wallet will become.  As you gain experience, you move to the higher levels of the food chain, like Editor/Quality Analyst (who proofreads the documents before submission to the client), Quality Supervisor (who is responsible for keeping check on Editors’ quality), Team Leader (who is responsible for everything that goes wrong!) and so on.  Considering the money involved, the usual hazards of spending long hours before the computer are also negligible.  All in all, medical transcription is a good career option for people who hate redundancy at work and who do not want to end up with jingle bells in their wallets!