A question for cherry-pickers and rule-breakers

• A question for cherry-pickers and rule-breakers - Curious MT
  • Had this happen once - SAM
  • Sometimes, it is management allocating jobs to their fav MT. - just went through that song and dance
  • If those companies paid a fair wage, and paid more - cpl for the harder work, so that it -
  • I'm glad your company - catsxoxo
  • It's because we aren't paid enough to - give a cr@p. nm
    • Well, if someone doesn't give a - Curious MT
      • Some people are in MT because it's the - only thing they know how to do.
        • No matter anyone's reason for sticking in a - Curious MT
        • but, but, but.... - cj
          • You said it!! - Curious MT
        • Been at it for nearly 37 years. - CrankyBeach
          • Ummm.... let me see if I have this right - - S/M
            • It's called BEING FAIR TO PATIENTS - 2 cents
          • You are very right - Curious MT
  • I want you for my account manager! sm - anon
    • I will do everything in my power to have cherry-pickers fired - Curious MT
  • Amen, sister! - CrankyBeach
    • I forgot to add, I hope that - Curious MT
    • Your supervisor sounds like a smart - Curious MT
  • Preach on, sister!..nm - Amen
    • Good to know - Curious MT

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I have been struggling all morning transcribing STAT reports that are OUT of turn-around.  Not to mention that these STAT reports are dictated by the worst ESL I've ever done.  Meanwhile, everytime I go in to grab a new dictation, I can't help but notice a certain CHERRY PICKER grabbing up every current report dictated by the best.

So if there are any cherry pickers out there bold enough to answer my question, could you please just tell me why???  What gives you the right?  Do you not even realize what you are doing to the rest of us?  Why not just join in and divide the misery for a while so we can all have a decent line count at the end of the day?  GRRR.

Thanks for letting me vent...

How do you all deal with cherry pickers on pool accounts where there are several MTs working on the same account?  What I mean is, some MTs take the best work, even when it's not the next work to be taken, leaving the worst dictators for the ethical MTs.  Any suggestions?  (Talking to the MTSO doesn't seem to help, even though they have rules against this.) 

Cherry picking sure hurts the hospitals because they are waiting on these reports and if the cherry picker skips over, then if no one else is on-line, its gonna take a while to do those reports..so it hurts the hospital and the trans service..and the patient, which is supposedly what we are all about..LEGAL ACCURATE MEDICAL RECORDS..I cant believe that a cherry picker would even post here..I would be too ashamed to admit that I shaft my coworkers, the hospital and trans service I work for..

I work at-home for a fairly small community hospital.  We have maybe four ESLs on staff at this hospital.  We all have the capability of looking up what reports are on the system and we are allowed to self assign provided we do not abuse it.  The powers that be decided to allow us to have this capability because on second shift and weekends there may be occasion where a report is needed stat and there is no one in the department to assign it and so the person needing the report can simply check to see what MT's are on the system typing and email one of us and we can self assign and do the report.

I usually work first shift, but this week I am filling in for another girl and working second shift.  It is me and one other MT on second.  I plugging along and I get rather lengthy consult by an ESL doctor we all kind of dislike doing because A) He is an ESL dictator and B) All his reports are looooooooong!  So, I get an 8 min consult and I type it, takes me about 20 minutes.  Then, a couple of reports later I get another consult, same dictator, 10 minutes long.  Now, I'm thinking okay what's the other girl doing.  So check on her and she is sitting on the same report she was on when I got the first 8 minute consult.  Her report is a 4 minute H&P by a very American, very good dictator.  So I type the second, 10 minute consult, with just a little irritation nagging me.  A few reports later I get yet another 15 minute consult by the same ESL dictator.  Now I'm steamed.  I look at the job list again and find that she is STILL on the same 4 minute report she has been on for the last hour and a half!  Presumably she has been waiting for me to clear out all the offending dictations so she doesn't get stuck with one!

So now I'm considering letting the supervisor know because it just burns me up when someone treats their co-workers so unfairly.  If she's doing it do me, she's done it to everyone.  But I'm afraid if I gripe about her to management, they will simply take away our self-assign capability and take away our ability to see what is on the system and I hate to penalize everyone because of one person's self-serving and unfair attitude.

What would you all do?

This entire morning I have gotten nothing but leftovers from yesterday that no one else wanted to do.  I am at the point where I am going to start sending them back, too, so I can make a decent line count.  Whatcha think?  Then no one will be doing them and maybe the MTSO do something about it (ha ha ha ha ha). 

That's what I was taught.  Everyone is in the same boat and has to take the bad with the good.  Refusing to do the hard stuff makes it worse for the other MTs on that account, and they will not appreciate it.  Until the problem doctors go poof and disappear, nobody has the right to say they can shove all the bad jobs onto the next MT because THEY are here to make money (everyone is, and someone has to type it).  And there is such a thing as Karma - one day you might log on to find ALL the work is the dictator you dread, because all the MTs that came on before you felt entitled to leave the crap work for YOU.  You really won't make any money on that shift, as opposed to doing a few bad jobs each shift.  So type them as you get them, like the rest of us. 

If everyone got together and went to management about the problem guy, that's one thing (and yes, we all feel this way about at least one doctor).  Deciding you don't have to do it because you don't want to is quite another, and often grounds for disciplinary action.  Work is often just that, hard work, and with time and practice it becomes easier.  Nobody promised you a rose garden, challenges are what this job entails.

you set your own line rate.  However, we all know that NONE of the MTSOs hiring IC MTs allow us to set our own rate.  They "offer" a rate, and we accept if it's OK.

I worked for a real cheapo doctor when I first started out.  He paid hourly and kept riding my backside to type faster because he only wanted to pay for the actual time dictated instead of the time it took to transcribe.  More than once I told him that it takes an average of 3:1 typing to talking ratio to get it done.  It worked out to be $.03 per line.  I dropped him like a bad habit.  He bounced through a few other transcriptionists who all quit on him before he wound up having to pay to outsource to a service.

I use an "f" after any abbreviation that I want to expand.  I just use the standard abbreviation plus f, so I do not forget what they are.  My ShortHand is full of things like this.

ex: cbcf  tcpf  tshf

Works for me!

Hmm...I thought that that was already in effect, that no US Govt transcription contracts could go overseas/be outsourced - at least the V.A. has that standard in place...

...requires a covered entity to make "reasonable efforts to limit use, disclosure of, and requests for PHI to the minimum necessary to accomplish the intended purpose."  The only AHA-approved HIPAA training program, HIPAA Academy, specifically states in its training materials that HIPAA intends that personal information be limited to document headers unless absolutely required   I will quote page 4-56:

"In practice, we expect the minimum-necessary requirement to lead to compartmentalization of the medical record so that one portion of the record (the body of the report) may be readily disclosed for one purpose without compromising the privacy of the entire record."

By limiting PHI to headers, reports can easily be redacted of personal information; when the PHI is scattered throughout the reports, this information cannot be redacted.

....reboot!

That will take care of about 95% of problems.

If you have two identical toolbars, then you may need to go to View, then Toolbars, and then Customize (way down at the bottom of the list). On the Toolbars tab, see what is checked.

If both Standard and Formatting are checked, this is where you may have your duplicate. Try unchecking either one of those and see if that puts your toolbar back the way you want it.

If that doesn't work, come back and we'll try again!

the time changes. Daylight Savings starts in April and Standard Time in October. It always works for me. Change all the clocks and change all the batteries.

For those who haven't done so yet, though, better get changing.

The patient has had intermittent diarrhea for four to five days.

Instead of:

The patient has had intermittent diarrhea for 4-5 days. Do much easier to 'quickly read' the number of days as 4-5.