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My story:  I started a week ago with sneezing.  At first, I thought it was allergies because we took DH's truck for a long drive (the one he takes the dog to the shop in).  But after 2 doses of Benadryl and 6 hours later, still sneezing.  The sneezing started up again the next day and by the third day I was coughing.  The coughing got worse as the week went on and it got to the point where I was gagging on the mucus.  I self-medicated with OTC stuff -- Robitussin, Mucinex, etc.  By Sunday, I was on the couch the entire day.  My body hurt, my ears hurt, I had chills, still coughing and sneezing.  Finally on Monday, I called my doc and made an appt for that afternoon.

My doc did a thorough exam on me and told me that what I had was more than likely viral and that antibiotics would do me no good (I'm old school, I say give me the Z-pack and send me on my way), but not this newbie.  He gave me an inhaler.  We have 3 of those in my house already and told me to continue with my OTC stuff.  I paid my copay and left.

Needless to say, the next time I get sick, I'll wait until I'm dead to go to the doctor's because I'm sure it's just a virus and we can't really treat a virus.  Maybe that's the prob with the workload.  People aren't going to their doctors because the doctors aren't doing much to help.  Save your money and wait it out.

As someone who has worked for two major national companies in my career as an MT, I have experienced the worse of the worse. Been at Precyse for 1-1/2 years and I have found them to be an absolute wonderful company to work for, very caring and eager to fix what needs fixing. Yes, they are not  perfect company.....Yes, there have slower times of the year that I have needed to flex my time. That is nothing new for me in this profession. In the 20 years as a Transcriptionist I have learned to expect such highs and lows for work and to adjust my schedule to compensate. Yes, I have worked on some difficult accounts with Precyse, but patient's whose reports are dictated by those difficult dictators deserve to have their reports done in a professional and accurate manner as well. It is a good thing that there are MTs who are willing to do them. The MTs at Precyse that I have talked to are VERY happy to be here and also have many war stories to tell about other companies they have worked for. I am glad I work for a company that cares about its employees and offers a great environment to work in, as well as some of the best benefits in the business. If you look hard enough, you are going to be able to find ex-employees who were not happy at Precyse for some reason, I happen to not be one of them! 

There's a certain natural tension between the need for reports to be complete and the need for MTs to be productive.  This means making a reasonable effort to resolve blanks and ambiguities, but no more.  There is an obligation to the client and patient, not only to deliver this report (the one that you're transcribing), but also those that are waiting in the queue behind it.

Dictation being what it is, some blanks are inevitable.  Sometimes you just need a second set of ears (the way we used to hand our earphones to the person next to us and ask what's this guy saying?).  As a supervisor I was much happier helping my people resolve blanks than being scared to leave them and making poor decisions.

That doesn't mean, however, that I didn't sometimes see blanks that undoubtedly should and could have been resolved by the MT.  For instance, I would see a blank early in a report due to a somewhat mumbled phrase that was dictated more clearly later and correctly transcribed, but the MT did not connect the dots with the earlier blank.  Or, I would see a blank for an unusual (but clearly pronounced) medication that I found in 5 seconds in the drug reference that we provided to MTs.  Or, I would see a blank for hypo-/hyper- such as hypoglycemia/hyperglycemia that was unclear, but the accompanying value made the choice obvious.  We hired only very experienced MTs for my accounts, and they should be able to resolve an ambiguity in a sentence such as The patient was extremely hyp?glycemic with a blood glucose of 26.

As I dealt with blanks turned in by my team, I sometimes had to address issues of inattention to context, lack of skills with reference materials or Web search methods, carelessness and yes, sometimes downright refusal to take even a brief amount of time to check a spelling.  I also sometimes had to deal with things like Expander errors, which occur due to inattention and/or the method that an MT uses to name her short forms (and in some cases, creating far too many short forms of questionable productive value).

However, I dealt with issues like these on an individual basis and only when I was satisfied in my mind that I wasn't misconstruing the situation.  In doing so, I found that most of these situations were opportunities to help an MT improve her skills or her understanding in some way and very few were cause for some sort of corrective action.  In other words, in my experience the vast majority of MTs take enormous pride in the work they do and the skills they bring to the dictation.  By contrast, a much smaller percentage of physicians exhibit that same level of care in their dictation, and to me that meant giving the MT the benefit of the doubt.

I was also keenly mindful of something else, which is that my connection to the dictation system might be better than what the MT had, so that what might be clear to me on reviewing the report could well have been less so when she transcribed it.  The phone system is such that we go through many different switches and circuits between here and there, and these connections can be quite different even between the same two locations on different phone calls.  You might call the system in Tampa from your home in Chicago, and one time your call could be routed through Atlanta while the next time it goes through Dallas.  Knowing this, again, the benefit of the doubt must go to the MT.

So, I looked for certain patterns of behaviors, not one-off incidents.  I produced for many, many years and have never forgotten the challenges of dealing with that tension between leaving no blanks and the corresponding responsibility not only to this job, but to the job behind it.  You can't lay down any rules about this.  You can only help your people have the best skills possible in doing rapid and effective research, in using the context of the report to help resolve ambiguities, and then you encourage them - yes, ENCOURAGE them - to leave a blank when they have made a reasonable effort rather than to believe that filling in anything is better than leaving a blank.  The supervisor should be the MT's resource of last resort - the backstop, so to speak.  It's the patient and that report that matter most, and getting it right is more important than who fills in the blank.

nm

lot of drastic changes in the workplace in general, not just MT.  Those changes have been a long time in the making.  The agenda in the US has been top dollar for corporations with very little respect for workers, and this has happened right under our noses to a certain extent.  Inch by inch the rug has been pulled out from under the majority of Americans, but we are a strong, resilient lot and we will recover and hopefully be smarter.  I have great faith now that we have new leadership.  I honestly didn't think we could make it happen, but the people stepped up and woohoo!