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What is Medical Transcription?

Medical transcriptionists (MTs) are the miracle workers of the medical records! They turn doctors’ daily dictation tapes - rough, hurried, harried, mumbled, muttered, highly technical, and always absolutely crucial - into clear, concise, polished gems of documentation. They work this amazing transformation every day under tight deadlines using just a simple tape or digital audio player, a computer, and a stack of medical books and online reference sources.

Jobs Outlook – “Boom”ing?

Remember all those “baby boomers”? According to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), job opportunities for MT’s will be good - growing faster than the national average for occupations through 2012, with the demand fueled by the increased healthcare demands of a growing and aging population.

It’s not hard to see that lots more senior citizens needing lots more doctor visits means tons of new medical records to be generated! There’s going to be plenty of work out there to go around.

Then there’s the big “O”: Outsourcing…

There has been a steady stream of news lately about various US industries improving their bottom lines by replacing American workers with low-wage overseas labor – skilled jobs like computer programming, telephone help desks - almost any job that can be performed remotely.

In medical transcription, however, issues such as little or no foreign enforcement of US privacy laws, instability of foreign labor, lack of English fluency, expense and uncertainty of adequately training foreign labor, etc. can greatly complicate foreign outsourcing and offset the initially perceived cost savings.

Legal questions have even begun: The California legislature has discussed prohibiting all California industries from using foreign outsourcing involving confidential data, mainly because it is simply not possible to guarantee privacy outside of the country.

The BLS states that foreign outsourcing should not significantly impact the medical transcription profession in the US.

Robot Transcriptionists?

Another MT industry buzz involves new technologies such as speech recognition technologies (SRT’s), computerized “smart” data entry forms (EMR’s, CPR’s), etc. that promise to automate or eliminate traditional transcription work. Several software vendors have been very successfully selling tools of this nature to various industries and have been making noise to promote their use for medical transcription.

It is becoming apparent, however, that the complexity of medical diagnosis and terminology combined with the life-and-death importance of accuracy will prevent large-scale acceptance of these technologies in the medical field for the foreseeable future.

According to the Medical Records Institute (an organization that promotes the adoption of computerized medical records systems), most current research shows that penetration into the medical field by EMR’s is only 5-8%, with SRT’s at less than 1%.