I've been in MT for 20 years. Started out in the office at a hospital.
Posted By: RockinMT on 2008-09-11
In Reply to: I am fairly new with my company and I tried the control Y one time, and it didn't work, so I thou - jmn
Switched to working for services from home for a while and now I work for the same hospital I started out at, but I work from home now. So I guess you can say I've come full circle and now I'm back where I started. I much prefer being an employee of a hospital versus an IC or employee of an MTSO.
It may be that your user profile in EXText is not set up to allow you to add normals. I've found with services they don't give their MTs a whole lot of freedom with their software. 
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I have 13 years experience and just started a hospital job working from home making $16 an hour
and with a really good incentive plan. I live in the Kansas City area. $10 seems like a low starting point even with only two years experience which is the usual benchmark for hospital MT jobs.
It's been my experience that the low end of the pay scale for hospital employed MTs was around $12 an hour. Also, it's been my experience that the pay offered is usually based on years of experience and how well you perform on the transcription test.
I would say if their pay is that low, they should at least be making it up with incentive and it doesn't sound like they are.
JMO
Our office just started it. Not sure yet how it will go.
;
When I started at the hospital
in high school, I was offered $3.00 more per hour to be a transcriptionist. I learned so much. The ones who have been in this field a long time has seen it decline. I do have my own accounts now after 19 years and have had them for a while, but it is hard for someone new to network unless they work on-site and are "noticed" so to speak.
These nationals and small MTSOs (paying cheap labor), which most I have tried just for extra cash do, have put a damper on this profession. What was once a high-paying job is not any longer due to these types of businesses. The docs don't seem to mind paying a low rate to an offshore company because they see it as good business sense. They don't really look at it like they are putting American MTs out of work. JMO.
I try not to complain because I love what I do. I'd switch in a minute and I'm young enough, but right now my CHILDREN come first. I also can't see where I'd make as much hourly on-site that I make now working as an IC.
I will pursue something else sooner or later, but probably at that point won't be looking for more per hour, but maybe just a nice retirement plan where I can put in 20 years. I think I'll be ready for some people contact by then, as I love people. I will give this another 5 years tops, and then I'll be back on-site! 
58, AHP/self-taught, trained at hospital 5 years, now with 2 of my own accounts for 10 years, employ
Also worn out 2 keyboards in 4 years. I will never retire. DH will come home some day from work and I'll be slumped over my keyboard. I put in 14 hours a day 7 days a week.
Our hospital has started dabbling with VR...
... and at present it is only marginally useful. Most of the docs using it prefer live MTs. Others think they're doing such a bang-up job of using VR that they sign off their work without ever reading it or sending it to be edited. Now THAT is ANOTHER train-wreck going somewhere to happen. I've read what the VR comes up with, and although the company that built it says it's "100% trainable", it turns out not to be. It just doesn't learn some things, and makes the same mistakes over and over again. Some people in our office believe our MT Dept. will only be there for 3, maybe 5 more years. That may be the case, but not because VR is going to take over the whole hospital. More than likely they will simply send all their more difficult dictation out to an MT company, in order to save themselves the money involved with hiring, training, housing and insuring live MTs. I have no problem with leaving the hospital to be an at-home MT for a national, but will not work for any that doesn't provide the basic benefits: healthcare, PTO, vacation, etc. I've looked into other related fields, one being court reporting, another being closed captioning for TV. Unfortunately, TV is already using MOSTLY VR. (And the results are pretty funny.... I always get a good laugh at reading the captions on our TV sets at the gym!) Live court-reporting still exists for some legal reasons. You can make a good living at it, but it takes YEARS to build speed and learn an entirely different "language" on the stenotype machine. I figure I'm a little too close to retirement to be having to go back to school FULL TIME for 5 or 6 years! (Part-time would take 'WAY too long.) And what would I do -- go back and live with my parents? I don't THINK so!
I think things could get worse before they get better. Offshoring and the so-called promise of VR has lowered the respectibility of the MT profession considerably. (That ol' "out of sight, out of mind" adage!) Others think that if a machine (VR) can transcribe, then those of us who still do it live are nothing less than machines, outselves.
Once again, I think it's impoirtant for PATIENTS to tell they docs they not only don't want their info. going offshore, they ALSO don't want a VR program transcribing their medical notes unless it is fully edited by a professional MT before the doc can sign it. If the doc can't promise that won't happen, then maybe it's a good time to go doc-shopping.
Paralegal and legal secty. are good professions, but a little too formal and rigid for me, and again, there is the amount of time, school, and money involved before embarking on a new career. In MT, I'm at the top of my field & payscale.... with anything else, I'd be starting about again as a newbie, with the added problem of being late middle-aged and having to compete with a bunch of 20 or 30-somethings.
As for people dissing the MT profession: When I was in college, and flunking out of my classes from boredom even tho' I had a high IQ, my friends & relatives thought I was slacking off when I went to a trade school to learn MT. I have friends whose parents didn't allow them to take typing in high school back in the 70's, because they didn't want them to end up in a "dead-end secretarial profession." Well, most of those non-typists today are struggling to learn to use computers, and even when they do learn, they sure do type slowly, some hunt-and-peck. Yikes! AND.... when I see all the friends with MBAs, PhDs, etc. who had the fancy, big-bux jobs in the 80s, who are now either unemployed or doing menial jobs just to survive, it makes me feel a little better that I stuck with the healthcare industry and MT work. Things were looking bad in the late 1990s, the cost of everything was rising so fast that the "little people" like us could hardly afford an apartment in the silicon valley, and many of us were officially members of the "Working Poor" class. Then came the dot-com bust, and all of a sudden, things got better for us. Many of the fancy-job people moved out of state, and rents started to go down. Meanwhile, those of us in MT were still plugging away at it, and getting the occasional raise. Most of my fancy-job siblings don't even have health insurance, and are working lower paying jobs now. So I've been able to catch up to them a little bit. I can also leave the work behind me at the end of the day when I walk out the door - I'm not shackled to a cellphone, a pager, or a blackberry. I'm not on 24-hour call.
If I'm wrong, and live MTs DO become obsolute in the future, I'm hoping that since right now I'm socking away every dime I can into my 401K, that if MT disappears 5 years before I'd be officially eligible for retirement (although I don't believe any of us under 60 will ever be able to FULLY retire...), that it will take up the slack from whatever low-paying part-time job I may have to take in my old age in order to afford both an apartment AND food to eat!
Started in 1979 when I was 18, worked in office at MQ while it was still
.
That's about the time my hospital started treating its -nm
..
I am glad I was sitting in an office with experienced MTs when I first started.
I think I have a decent ear for accents, but I can't imagine doing ESLs for acute care when you are a newbie without having a trainer sitting at the next desk to interpret now and then. Otherwise I'd have cried at times.
I started too but home office got moved to bedroom. sm.
Now have to use earphones when husband is sleeping. I actually prefer the earphones just because my speakers weren't the best but it worked well the other way too.
I started in the file room of the urology office I worked. And I was not
going to be a file clerk for the rest of my life. I only had 2 semesters of terminology, no other professional schooling. They had a fresh from a Mayo Fellowship peds urologist coming in and needed somebody to help with the typing. First it was half file-room and half transcription. Finally he was so busy, I became full time. I was there from 1990 until 2003. I then left to free-lance and start my own business. He has since moved to Arizona and I still type for him after all these years.
I started part-time in a doc's office while still in high school. sm
That was in 1984. My career just bloomed from there......
I started in the file room of a 6 doctor urology office....
The file room in any office is a nuclear dumping ground...any paper that nobody knows what to do with gets dumped there. Then and there I made up my mind that I was NOT going to be a file clerk for the rest of my life.
I actually started by filing part time and typing part time. When we got a new Peds Urologist in the office, fresh from a fellowship at Mayo, I was right there. We used tapes back then as that was in the early 1990's. As he could fill up a 2 sided tape with 8 hours of seeing patient's, the other girl in the office did not want any part of his work and left it for me. The rest, as they say, is history.
I had no professional training, just 2 semesters of medical terminology and a killer spelling ability.
After I had typed urology, I was then farmed out to our other offices and I learned GI/GU, family practice, sleep labs etc.
I now work for a major hospital on the west side of Michigan and still type for my Peds urologist. The only difference is that he now has his practice in AZ, not MI.
If you can find somebody willing to take a chance on you with no experience, jump on it with both feet. You will be glad you did.
Before I started my own business, worked in a hospital in-house with taxes taken out & then went hom
was getting with shift differential 23.80 when I left. Your pay seems extremely low, you could make more as an IC seriously.
When I worked pathology office in a hospital
My experience was that I worked 3 times as hard for a set wage than I ever did as an MT - and in medical records as MT earned set wage plus incentive.
At pathology lab, we were responsible for getting there first thing in the morning and transcribing all the micro before 10 a.m. so the pathologists could then look at slides and dictate the gross report. Doctors tried to get the gross reports back to us by 1 p.m. -- because they had to be typed by 3 p.m. so the doctors could sign the reports, and get them back to us so we could get them sorted and in the mail before we went home. In addition, we fielded phone calls, took messages for pathologists, searched for and mailed slides when other labs requested them, provided courier coverage to transport slides and things between our lab and hospital lab in the next building, and when we had a spare minute, we entered Pap smear results from precoded sheets used by the technicians reading the Pap smears (like between 10 a.m. and noon, if we had all the micro typed)!!! Every day was hurry up and meet this 2-hour deadline, then hurry to meet the next 2-hour deadline...
I learned a lot of terminology -- but I would have to be very hungry to do it again. It is hard to describe or comprehend a pathology secretary job unless you have actually been there, done that -- you will either love it or hate it... good luck.
Started in-house at a hospital, medical records department, on a typewriter in
1983, earning $6.00/hour, eventually moving up after 7 years to $10.00/hour. All hospital work was then outsourced to a national service in 1986 (beginning of our downfall), went to work for the service and made $2.10/page. Service was bought out by another service, rate changed to $1.90/page. Rates changed again to $0.08/cpl. After many years of experience in all services, found my first account in 1992, charged $.09/cpl/gross lines but blank lines not counted. Business has grown steadily through the years through word of mouth. Now charging $.16/cpl or $25.00/hour or $6.00/page, and having to turn down work at this point. If you have the experience and are detail-oriented, you can find your own accounts eventually like I did. But you have to pay your dues first and be able to transcribe all ESLs accurately. If you learn how to transcribe ESLs well, those doctors are the ones to target for work. I do work an ungodly number of hours, only because I am trying to save at a faster pace for retirement because of all the uncertainty in this line of work.
Generally office notes versus hospital
For my accounts anyway, my multispecialty is office notes, letters, in office procedures and acute care is hospital notes.
When the kids started school I wanted a job in my home town. A hospital clerk position (sm)
came open. You started compiling charts, making copies, etc. Then I was promoted after a few months and began learning transcription and did that part of the day. Then a few months later they taught me coding and abstracting and I did that part of the day. It was a great learning experience to learn things from the bottom up. Needless to say, I am an old dog here who has been doing this more than 25 years now.
When the kids started school I wanted a job in my home town. A hospital clerk position (sm)
came open. You started compiling charts, making copies, etc. Then I was promoted after a few months and began learning transcription and did that part of the day. Then a few months later they taught me coding and abstracting and I did that part of the day. It was a great learning experience to learn things from the bottom up. Needless to say, I am an old dog here who has been doing this more than 25 years now.
Does your hospital have a Risk Management team or office? Contact them. (nm)
.
If you want to work at a local hospital or doctor's office, go to community college. Otherwise
if you want to work from home, for a national company, you need to take the course from either Andrews School or M-TEC. It does you no good to save money by taking the Penn Foster course, because most companies will NOT hire grads from that school, it is a poor course and does NOT prepare you sufficiently for MT work.
When they first started 8 years ago they were bad.
They have improved with time, experience and consistent feedback.
It bothers me too, but I faced the fact some time ago that the situation is not going to change.
Some of our clients don't know it either. Others specifically request it(lower pricing). Sad, but true.
37 years. started when i was 15. nmx
xx
That's how I started out 30 years ago, too. - sm
Biggest career mistake of my life. My friend went to court-reporting school - tried to talk me into it but I wanted faster results. Back then MT pay was almost comparable to CR pay, too. I figured, why go to school 3-6 years, when I can go for 20 weeks and have a job? So I chose MT and look what happened. It didnt matter after all these years whether I was good at it or not... the field is drying up in terms of being able to support yourself at it. My friend? Steady work, good money, owns a nice house, put her kids through college, etc.
That's what I started at 9 years ago SM
as an IC at the local hospital and at first, didn't make much money, but as I got more familiar with the dictators, I could do 150 minutes in 6 1/2 hours. That was a good deal. I left because:
1. I got bored.
2. I worked 7 days a week plus all the holidays.
3. I thought the grass was greener elsewhere. I needed bennies and the hospital, even though my work was good, wouldn't hire me as an employee because then they would lose #2.
When I first started out 10 years ago,
my very first job paid $.055 per 55 character line. My next job three months later paid $.07/65 characters. Then I had a hospital job paying $10 per hour plus incentive. Moved up to opening offers of $.08-.09 cpl with nationals. Got tired of nationals. Made very decent money for the next 2-3 years paid $.12/gross line until those two contracts got outsourced or went to VR. Got a part-time job outside the home in a different field for six months until that company laid everyone off. Now I'm trying to find another $.07/65 cpl job. Ten years later and I'm in the same place in life again.
i've started telling him that he better
never start a fight, but he can stand up for himself and finish it!! the direction our country is headed is terrifying!
If you just started MTing, how could have have been an MT for 10 years?
That's what your post below says.
9 years this month...started in
Well she started out as a reporter 26 years ago.
She's not poor by any means!
I started getting symptoms after about 3-5 years. Nobody could believe it. sm
Fellow MTs told me it was too early, but nope. I had the tests, and had/have bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome. Think it's anatomical for some. I have very tiny wrists, and I've read that sometimes that can be related.
Some 15-20 years later, I had endoscopic surgery on the right side. I wouldn't recommend endoscopic. If you get surgery, go open. I learned later that it's usually more effective. I still have symptoms in both wrists, can tell no improvement in the right hand.
Best things: Physical therapy was the very best, but Worker's Comp obviously wouldn't pay for that forever. Cat's Paw (exerciser) is cheap and mimics a lot of the stuff I was doing in PT.
SmartGlove when I work. Helps a lot.
Trackball - huge difference.
Shorthand - I have made it my hobby to learn to work smarter instead of harder. I studied the productivity sites and am constantly working on building my ShortHand file. It's rare that something isn't in it. I have gotten to where it shows a savings of about 50% keystrokes, which is something to think about. It's like working half a day and getting paid for a full day.
Rest. Get up at least once an hour, go to your dining room table, put your palm flat on the table and press down. You should feel a really good stretch. And then I take at least 5-10 minutes to break. Maybe not the best thing for productivity, but the best for longevity.
I started 35 years ago this month. sm
I started in a small hospital in the Midwest and spent 6 years there, then moved to the West Coast. When I started, we had two reference books, Dorland's and the Surgeon's Syllabus (a red much used book). We were on Royal typewriters, four carbon copies, all colored with different color white-out for each copy. Our dictation came in on wax records with the stats at the switchboard station. They would call us when one came in and we would walk down and get it. They were on lilac wax and the others were on a salmon color. We had little record players at our desk and we would transcribe the wax records, then put them in a press to take out the grooves and use them over and over. I loved working there. We then graduated to the Norelco reel-to-reel, and then to the Dictaphone plastic belts, then the magnetic belts, and then the MT/ST, then the Mag-Card, and finally to the computer, then to the Lanier pop-up tape system, then to the Sony Network, and then to digital voice. It's been a long joury and I was with one employer for over two decades before being sold to MQ. I had the best boss in the world, generous to a fault, but then MQ came along and offshoring and the MT business went down, down, down. I make half of what I used to and I work twice as hard. Benefits are hard to come by and there is no security. I long for the old days.
I quit for several years and started again.....
I'm a moron. I hate it and I hide it from my kids. It stinks.
I've been doing this doc for many years, so I've learned how to function with him. sm
I can tell what's a stutter, what's another word, what's just an "uh." Years of experience will get you through a lot.
Wouldn't want to do his charts all day, of course, but a few per day aren't bad. I haven't had to send his to review in a long time, but they do take a little longer to shuffle through.
I've worn contacts for 30 years. I've had both
hard and soft. My vision is much better with the soft ones than they were with the hard ones. When I first started trying contacts soft ones were still new and they couldn't get me to 20/20, so I went to hard. Hard were okay until my eyes started changing shape and then I could no longer wear hard ones. The soft should give you better vision as they conform more to the shape of your eye.
This really is pathetic. 5 years ago I started out with .07 and they are still only paying that?
started at about 8K PT 2002, last couple years 12K but
I did not work much in 2005 for about 6 months when my 5-y/o got diagnosed with cancer and going through chemo, etc. So I would have made a bit more. I expect to do about $16K this year. I alternate my hours a lot though, about 60 or so minutes of work during the school year a day, but then only 30 during the summer, plus a side job that fluctuates ($300-500 a month). I am shooting for $20K next year, still not at FT (5-6 hours a day). I'll see how it goes. I think $12K for PT is good, but that is my opinion.
I've just started using SH, where do I set expansion with normal punc...nm
x
Ive worked Sundays since I started transcribing 18 years ago!
..but i know that they always need to be covered and people keep getting sick and having operations... holidays too. we are in one of those kind of jobs. i love having time off during the week to get things done though.
Yes! My kids (above, age 22 and 24) started out making more than I make after 30 years of MT!
.
I proof as I go. I didn't when I first started umpteen years ago. nm
x
I started a neighborhood watch a couple of years ago...sm
we were having similar problems to what you're having and they're gone now. Here's what worked for us. I gave every home in the subdvision a flier asking anyone that was interested in forming a neighborhood watch to come to an organization meeting and made the meeting a week later and on a week night, and gave my phone # in the event someone was interested but couldn't attend then. Out of 150 homes in my subdivision we had 40 people show up and 20 called expressing interest.
Everyone had the same complaints on the same "problem" homes and as a group we decided that each time the noise level was high enough to hear outside of the vehicle or house that we'd call the police. We all alternated placing those calls so the police department didn't think it was just 1 person complaining. The police department agreed to increase the patrols for our subdivision at all hours of the day and night and just having people see them ride through every few hours helped significantly cut down on the problems.
Over time the people that were causing problems either put their houses up for sale or moved out of the rental home and left when they saw that we neighbors insisted on a peaceful and quiet living area. It worked! When these problem homes left the problems with the trash thrown on the roads left as well.
In addition we were having some problems with some of the youth hanging out walking the streets at all hours and it was making some of the residents nervous, especially when the youth were walking through yards. So, we told the youth to stick to the roads, ask permission before cutting through yards to find out who cared and didn't care if they walked through them, and one of the men placed a basketball goal at the end of one of the cul-dec-sacs for the kids to play basketball after the neighbors in the cul-dec-sac agreed it would be fine. It worked - some of them started playing basketball there and they honored requests of homeowners that didn't want them walking on their yards.
Good luck to you!
Go for it.. almost every position in an office I've ever had
I started at part-time, and alot of time just wanted to stay part-time and actually had to fight to work only part-time hours. If you are a good employee they should realize that and almost certainly will try to get you to be a full-time employee in the future. Just make sure that you don't end up working "just short of full-time hours" and getting no benefits. If you're there 32 hours..(PT) you might as well be there 36-40 and get full-time benefits.
3 years for hospital sm
but it was from home and they don't really know me.... i've been working IC from home for over 12 years and so it's not likely I will go to a hospital at this point to work
7 years, last 5 at the same hospital. nm.
x
all that PLUS, when I started 13 years ago, electric typewriters were still used (smile!) no message
xx
At my hospital, even 25+ years ago, you were required SM
to type 1100 per day. That was with NO spell check, NO expanders. Nothing. Everybody typed a lot more than that.
I think the trouble that you describe must have something to do with working on some company's lame platform. I work in Word, I make my own expanders, my own everything, and work 5 hours a day, if I have 150 minutes to do. That is about 2000-2200 lpd. It is not a problem, because I do what's fastest for ME. The people at the hospital do some kind of merge thing and put everything in their system.
Working on a platform that is designed for anything other than MT will only cost you money. They make these systems to help coding, discharge, everybody but us. I'll never, ever do it again. I'd rather work at Wendy's -- Just kidding! Just kidding! Don't get THAT started.
29 years, 16 at hospital, 4 as IC, 9 w/national
with the most lucrative income as an IC, although it sucked having to be responsible for accounts 7 days/week with no reliable backup subcontractor(s) for 2 of those years as an IC.
No, I've worked in doctor's business office.
That is what the insurance company allows, not what they dictate. Who is to tell the doctor how long he can sit and talk with his patient. It is up to him. True insurance companies get together to decide what is the appropriate amount for the doctor to "charge" for a service but I've literally seen where the doctor sees the patient all of 2 minutes after patient is worked up by techs, but they still get paid for that visit.
I've tried to go back to the office a number of times and
I never can make the transition. One consideration is your wardrobe. You have to start dressing in office attire which is something I don't miss and found irritating when I went back into the office. I also found that after working at home for as long as I have done it, it's kind of stressful to get out there and try to be social and friendly. Office politics is another negative. Offices are very much like high school, very cliquey and filled with gossip. There is more to working in an office than just doing your job. At home, it's just me and my PC. I do the work and I get paid. In the office, there's you, your PC, the person who shares the desk with you, the person who sits across from you, the person who sits next to you, your supervisor right across the hall, the doctors knowing you by name and seeking you out to complain about their dictation, the constant ringing of phones, chattering of voices. The people you share office space with, one will always be hot, one will always be cold, one thinks it's too bright and there's a glare on her screen, and one thinks it's too dark. You can't wear perfume because the girl next to you is allergic...
I could go on...
I worked for a hospital at home for 4 years. sm
We had to work set hours. My advice is allow youself 1/2 hour for lunch, and at least two 15-minute break periods. Work 2 hours, take a break, work 2 hours, take a lunch break, etc. Otherwise, you may find yourself having back, shoulder and hand problems. Working 9 hours may seem like a drag, but not being able to work at all is even worse. Remember, if you were working on site, you would not only have to work 8-1/2 hours, but would have travel time on top of it. Just my experience.
Aeron chair - never would use any other. About eight years ago my hospital
bought all of the transcriptionists Herman Miller chairs and we always say we are taking them when we leave. Yea right, BUT, I would buy one even if I had to pay for it over time. It is so worth it considering we sit all day. It is made of some kind of a nylon mesh that gives to your body weight and is always comfortable. There is tons on line about it. I love my chair, I love my chair, I love my chair.
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