Bigger ain't necessarily better!
Posted By: Ready to leave national on 2005-09-30
In Reply to: Go for a big - national!
Just because someone works for a national doesn't mean their accounts aren't overstaffed, they don't have a terrible platform that breaks down virtually every day, (sometimes for 8 hours at a time), and they don't constantly run out of work. I simply can no longer afford to remain with my current employer, which is a national.
I'm a hard-working, loyal, dependable, dedicated person who takes pride in her work and doesn't like to switch jobs. I'm not looking for my next job; I'm looking for my FINAL job.
All I want is an HONEST company with a dependable platform that actually works, an abundance of work (with no overstaffing/bait-and-switch games) and decent medical benefits. If it's a small company, that's fine. I just want to work for an ethical company that I can trust and respect, and one which is willing to pay a fair cpl rate. (To actually receive respect and some loyalty in return would be the proverbial icing on the cake.)
Is there such an animal out there somewhere? 
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Much bigger and better than TT
Advise you to stay where you are.
It seems to mostly be the bigger
corporations looking to make an even bigger profit off our backs, paying much less but charging the same - not so much the smaller MTSOs.
Bigger yes, better, NWIH.
nm
Once the kids are bigger sm
I'm going into EMS. I'm an EMT now and going to go to paramedic school. Each and every day you get a chance to make a difference in someone's life doing that. I've wanted to be a paramedic since I first watched Emergency! years ago on TV, and once my children are all in school, I'm going to do it!
The bigger picture sm
I am an MT as well and have been in this business almost 20 years. There are some who have more years invested in this line of work than I do, but 20 years at one job is a long time, and for those of us who have worked at home in this business for that long, it is very difficult to reenter the public work world IF there is a job out there that we might qualify for.
I agree with you in that the entire industry is suffering and has been for the past few years, but when I see company after company not giving raises and, worse yet, cutting line rates, I think it is time to look for employment outside of the MT world. You won't find a better situation in another MT company. They are all swimming in the same murky water and circling the same drain.
No, it's not just MTs who are being impacted, but this is *MY* profession (or what's left of it) and *I* am being impacted with this company's decision to find another way for me to make even less in my paycheck while everything around me...utilities, groceries, gasoline, insurance, etc....is rising to the point that I simply cannot afford to live any more.
I'm a realist as well, and what I see is an entire industry crumbling under the weight of top-heavy management and slave wages for the ones how pay that management. It's time to move on down the road.
VR is a much bigger threat to MTs than offshore
They will still need us, but pay diddly for the most boring, exasperating work you could ever imagine. I'd rather lick stamps and put them on envelopes than continue doing this crud. It's terrible - most of the dictation comes out as a word salad and you have to make some sense of it all. Terrible.
The account can get bigger if the hospital uses...sm
several services for their transcription. So, if they decide to start letting company B do what company A used to do, then yes, the account is getting bigger and bigger for company B. Also, Maybe the hospital is part of a large system and company A was only doing one location and the hospital is happy with the work so they start giving them more and more locations, guess what, the account is getting bigger and bigger. There are many ways for the account to get bigger, so she is not lying to you, as I work on one of the accounts she is talking about and that is what has happened. They now need double the amount of MTs they first needed for this account, as they are now outsourcing more work to Diskriter. Make sense?
You won't see some of the bigger ones here. I know for a fact that the owners of sm
KS do not come on here anymore. I went to one of them a few weeks ago, and she told me not to get worked up about the posts on here, that not every company is for every person, just just like every MT is not a good fit for every company.
I just emailed her with the request put here today, and she responded that she would not answer any posts on here; every time in the past that she did, things were twisted around and turned ugly, both with the bashers and the cheerleaders, that MTs with questions should contact the companies directly.
She also asked me if I needed more work as I seem to spend a lot of time obsessing about these posts, which really threw me for a few seconds. On thinking about it, she's right.
Oreilly is an even bigger media
hore. Yes, and so are the ones on the so-called 'left'. And if you think ANY of them give a flip about you or America, you are easily fooled.
The are full-time propagandists - all of them. And they are laughing all the way to the bank.
Sometimes the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Lots of these big MTSO co's are in bed with AHDI, and I have a hunch the whole kit-n-kaboodle of 'em are ridin' for a fall. Or a public hangin'.
When my company merged with a bigger one,
cpl pay stayed the same for a while, but eventually they readjusted the 'tiers' that their MTs worked on. No matter what 'tier' we were on, our pay was lowered approximately 15%. QA took a harder hit; some of them were cut 30%. They have plenty of work, but it's impossible to make a living doing it, unless you work 7-day weeks, 365 days a year.
So I would venture a guess that for the time being, things for you will stay as they are. They can't change everything at once, even if they wanted to. Physically impossible. But after the initial 'shake-out' of MTs who leave immediately, and those who stay for a while until they find other jobs, and those who stay to give the new company a chance, get disenchanted and leave later on, has finally occurred, and some of the other nuts and bolts of merging 2 companies are finally in position, eventually they will start to scrutinize MT pay. Those at the higher end of the pay scale will undoubtedly either find themselves re-tiered at a lower cpl rate, or else with horrendous accounts that cut the lines they're able to produce, and thus their pay.
Having just spent $16M to purchase MDI, you can bet they're going to want to start seeing some returns on their investment, and of course, the suits are going to want to see some extra cash for themselves for all the 'good work' they've been doing. [snort!] So when they start looking for places to cut their costs, guess whose pocket it's going to come out of?
The big companies are ALL this way. I believe the best chance for a decent-paying job is to find a small or medium-sized MTSO to work for. Only problem is, that's what I did a few years ago. A great company, decent pay, good accounts. And they were gobbled up by one of the current 'Axis-of-Evil' MT giants.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the future there are NO small MTSOs -- only 3 or 4 of the mega-large 'McMTSOs'. My company makes it no secret that they want absolute domination of the industry. I'm sure the other biggies have the same aspirations. Then it'll all boil down to cutthroat competition, price wars and back-stabbing, all the while flinging U.S. workers aside, and sending EVERYTHING offshore, because if hospitals no longer have a CHOICE whether they offshore or not, that paves the way for MT to become a 100% foreign affair.
I do believe, however, that if a company reaches a point where it has all or most of its workers offshore, they should no longer be allowed to have their offices on U.S. soil. They should be forced to move to India completely, corporate offices, CEOs, and all. It's about time the Suits developed a taste for curry, themselves.
How big is Transheath and now does this make Webmedex bigger than MQ? nm
or the small ones do not draw attention. It seems to be the bigger companies. sm
They are the ones mentioned the most, at least the ones that are growing.
Don't forget voice recognition. Bigger threat than too many MTs and
nm
Any bigger companies out there that do 10+ hours flex time?
I'm looking for a job to supplement my income on top of my full-time MT job, but really need one that allows me to log on at any time throughout the week and do, say, 2,000 lines a week or 10 hours a week or something like that.
Are there any companies out there that still offer this or is it too much to hope for? Anyone have a company they would like to recommend? Thanks.
LET THEM KNOW IT IS BIGGER THAN MT BUSINESS - Make them want to do the research and dig deeper
Give them facts that will blow their mind. MT business and otherwise. According to the web site for the Population Reference Bureau, they claim you can not get an accurate figure on offshored jobs (all jobs). In 2008 they said they could only estimate it to be about 30 MILLION. That is the equivalent to the total population in 3 U.S. states. No concrete and credible figures are documented anywhere. Wonder why? Make the reporter want to start with the MT business and branch out. See if they can come up with a figure cutting Uncle Sam's pay and our jobs.
Do not let anyone tell you this will not do any good. Even if some do not wish to participate, enough voices want to be heard. I myself sent a letter to President Obama. This is posted on the main board. Read it. I sent it to the major newspapers, NY Times, whitehouse.com, Washington Post, 60 Minutes, Forbes Magazine, USA today, etc. Make your guy want to do some investigation into this. Ask him to contact credible sources he may have. Ask for feedback.
Whether this works or not - pat yourself on the back!!! Thank you for 30 Million Plus U.S. Jobs and all the upcoming college graduates. We're all behind you. Share your results.
ALL YOU MTs, GET INVOLVED!! You're not working that much right now anyway. Just send 1 letter to a major newspaper near you. Share it with us.
Not necessarily going to ASR
All of a sudden, no work at ALL on my offices biggest ED account...no one seemed to know what happened
Well, MQ's ED templates is what happened.."over 70 different templates for 70 main chief complaints" is how it's billed...go to MQ's home page, look at the link for ER's. Doc picks the form, circles his choices and voila..all done! Don't need no MT to take care of business with these.
So, you mean to tell me after a week. the office finally says.."well, unbeknownst to us. SOMEONE sold them on the template system ..just amazing the answers they think we will believe.
Not necessarily ......sm
It could have the opposite affect too. The aircraft industry has tried that too and it just pushed more and more work offshore. We used to have 30,000 aircraft workers in my town and now we barely have 5000. My opinion is you train everybody you can to do transcription and take as much work as you can and that will leave less for them to do and evetually they will find out it is not the little pot of gold they once thought.
Not necessarily
Some MTs who have posted this kind of income were working for a service - it's mostly a matter of getting on a good account, I think.
Not necessarily so
I work at Spheris and have an account I've been on since day 1 with plenty of work. I do have a secondary but really just work on 2 accounts. I have not found them to be inflexible at all -quite the contrary. It's a big company with lots of supervisors, several platforms, and different people have different experiences. There are MANY happy employees here, along with some that are unhappy. Sorry you had a bad experience - I have had a very good one.
Well...not necessarily, but it CAN
All you have to do is create a new folder each week that you save all of your work into. At the end of the week, have Sylcount count all of the lines in that folder (the place where you saved all of your files for the week).
So, you would have a main folder called:
ABC Transcription (or whatever your company is called)
and inside that folder (after a year's time) you would have 52 folders (one for each week of the year).
Hope this helps,
Chickadee
Not necessarily
Just want decent pay, and to work with people I can respect, not people sticking daggers in my back. Managing people is really not my thing, I am more into QA, things like that.
Not so necessarily
Many high school grads are avoiding higher education in highly trained skills BECAUSE of the influx of foreign workers -- so yes, it is due, in part, to a reduced US skilled labor force not due to pay, but the realization of competition from outside countries. Even in the mid 1990s, software companies were bringing in foreign workers. I have a friend who works for one of those companies and while he has held onto his position, he recently told me that 90% of his coworkers from the 90s were laid off and have been replaced by foreign workers. The skill set of the foreign workers is higher than the ones let go and the work force is younger with fresher ideas, having grown up sucking their thumbs while surfing the net. They get an equal pay and performance bonus as he, while prorated for longevity.
If Silicon Valley employers can buy a retired cruise ship, import large numbers of foreign workers and float them in international waters for months at a time to work, bring them on shore for the government allotted time before returning them to sea, tell me where money is saved?
If our international MTSOs can spend millions of dollars on the construction from the ground up for the training of and employing of up to 5000 MTs (just for one company) in foreign countries, and those employees are now beginning to earn salaries and benefits close to what US MTs are getting, tell me where to find the savings, especially when you factor in lost profit due to power outages and riots over things we would never lose a day's work over.
It is a global economy, not just in the MT world, and will continue to filter down in every aspect of our daily lives.
Not necessarily.
I recently applied for a similar position. They did have a website, but it was very limited and didn't really have any info. No one had ever heard of this company. I was a little hesitant, but decided to accept the other anyway. It has turned out to be the best company I have ever worked for. The pay is much more than I was offered at any of the nationals. I had been there less than a month and received a raise as they said I was doing great and they appreciated all my hard work. There are good companies out there. I am very happy I took a chance.
Not necessarily - LOL (sm)
SM's platform is a horror.
Not necessarily..
Unless you don't mind working more than an 8-hour shift when the work is low to get your counts, or when there are problems with the platform, etc. Not trying to discourage you but there are problems there. And they quoted you 10 cpl?
Not necessarily
I can do 2000 lines in a day - usually a 9 to 10 hour day, but still ....
Anyhoo, my accuracy stays in the 98 to 99% range. I have occasional blanks when I just can't make something out. My company uses templates, too, for each doc (it's a clinic account) and I have them saved in Word with the modifications that are needed. I type in Word and then cut and paste into the platform.
I use lots and lots of expanders. That's how I can get 250 lph. Everything that is more than two or three characters that can be made into two or three characters is or has been and I add to it constantly when something else comes up.
Not everyone is fast and sloppy.
Not necessarily. When you have new MTs,
Indian MTs, or MTs who just really don't even try, it can slow you down DRASTICALLY & be very time-consuming. QAing is not something that should pay per line if you want it done right.
Not necessarily - sm
It is my belief that if the number of employees laid off is less than 50, then 29 USCS 2106 and 20 CFR 639.1 would still apply.
Good luck!
Not necessarily--probably just tell them --sm
to look in the *archives* or Google it. *This has been discussed here a thousand times. look it up* or some other such rude answer. Nobody on this board seems to want to help any longer.
Not necessarily...
Sometimes the bar is set so high that, even those who do meet it, can't do so for any length of time without suffering the consequences in terms of health, mentally and/or physically. Sometimes meeting the bar takes a toll. It doesn't necessarily mean a person can't meet it...simply that they won't. It all depends on each person's priorities. ;-)
Not necessarily.
Signing a nondisclosure agreement at the outset of your conversation with the company presents no onerous burden to you and allows them to discuss the position in greater (specific) detail with the knowledge that you have agreed not to disclose anything you learn during your conversation with them, such as who their clients are. This is reasonable for them to ask, especially since neither of you knows whether you will be offered or will accept a position with them.
Sign the forms and get yourself into the conversation. It's nothing you should worry about and it makes perfect legal sense.
Not necessarily - there are 2 systems....sm
Transcend's and eScription used by MDI-Florida.
Not necessarily 2 weeks (sm)
It depends on how fast you pick up their excellent system. Your reimbursed after so many months for your expenses out of pocket. No charge for the use of their computer which they maintain excellently. No one looking over your shoulder. What more could a happy MT ask for. Excelent work environment.
Not necessarily. I was a CS grad...
xx
Not necessarily-if you get a bad dictator -- sm
your production is hurt whether you are experienced or not. Fast production not only depends on the MT's ability but the quality of the dictator and how fast or slow they speak or how clear the speak.
A person with more experience will leave far less blanks but will still be limited on how fast she/he is. Thus they deserve to be paid more than 7 cpl.
It isn't necessarily overscheduling. My
account is fairly new. They may get 800 minutes one day and get 1500 the next day. The TAT on my account is very short. If they staff for 800 minutes and there is 1500 they can't stay within TAT. If they staff for 1500 and only get 800 then obviously there isn't going to be enough work to go around.
If you've had an account a while and can see the trend in dictation, or have a longer TAT, then you can better staff so that everyone has plenty of work.
I agree there are companies that overhire. There are horrible companies that constantly have ads running because they can't keep people, but there are also companies that frequently have ads running because they have getting new accounts. My company has gotten 4 large accounts within the past 6 weeks and have had to hire probably 100 new MTs.
That is not necessarily true...
The company has a right to control the end result, but they cannot control the means to the end result. As I understand it, they can require a certain number of lines each week, but cannot tell the IC how to complete those lines (which hours or how many hours).
Not necessarily spiteful
The negative comments were well unpleasant, but seemed genuine and not over the top. Is it not possible that some people really did have a bad experience, and were just trying to answer the original poster's question honestly?
Most readers know to take comments posted with a grain of salt...
Not necessarily true.
My company has Global in their name, yet they are a very small US-based company. They are the best company I have worked for yet. I wouldn't judge a company based on their name.
VR does not necessarily increase
your speed. If you are making lots of corrections, then you will actually lose ground.
not necessarily fault of the MT
I ran into a former coworker of mine. She works at a hospital where the doctors are allowed to send the VR reports out without review by an MT and was telling me about the HUGE problems this has caused. Can you imagine? Egads.
Agreed. What you train on is not necessarily what
you'll end up with. You'll never know what account you'll be on from day to day or hour to hour. I agree with the 1 to 2 days for support, but that is too long IMHO if you have several similar reports back to back and have to leave blanks in all of them.
Not necessarily, I'm paid better by the national right now. -nm
x
Are all the bad applicants necessarily newbies?????
x
Not necessarily true; my acct is less than 50% ESL SM
The higher paying accts are higher percentage ESL but there are many other accounts which are nowhere near as high as your 80%. There are at least 20 different accounts there (maybe more?) and not all of them are high ESL. (BTW, been with them for 6 years now so don't suggest that I'm a newbie and they will bait and switch me to another account later.)
Outsourcing does not necessarily mean offshoring. nm
not necessarily so - I think it depends on the company and how they set it up(sm)
I worked on a hospital using Cquence and the lines produced on it were paid with spaces (the way my company was paying us.)
VOip and digital are not necessarily the same.
VOip is voice over internet protocol. I have digital phone and it is not over the internet, uses a regular phone line. It is not connected to my computer at all, thus you don't get the hesitations, etc.
Do you necessarily make more if you only type ops?
nm
Not necessarily so about the pay scale. But more importantly, you can get an almost
It all depends on what you mean when you say company A pays MTs well. They could be paying same amount to company B and company B is okay with a smaller profit.
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