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Serving Over 20,000 US Medical Transcriptionists

Is work continuously being outsourced?

Posted By: amelia on 2007-01-20
In Reply to: Well, what I feared would happen to my job, has happened. SM - MissouriMT

I'm just starting on a medical transcription career. But it sounds like too many companies are firing American workers and outsourcing to other countries. Is this common? Maybe I shouldn't pay for my training and try something else. Thanks.

amelia


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Our tax returns are outsourced. Our credit history is outsourced. Our employers know everything
our age, our residence, our credit (if they want it), any criminal activity, etc.  What is new here?  You apply for health insurance and your employee knows your health background.  What is new here?  Privacy is long gone.
Just because work is outsourced, unless
you have access to the entire medical record, not all personal info is available, only what the doctor chooses to include in his dictation. MTs do not necessarily have access to the entire record with the billing info and such.
I suppose all the work that is outsourced
Makes no sense.  What do they expect for 7-10 cpl?
I was told that Healthscribe outsourced and when acquired, that Spheris would be bringing work
And this is information came to me from the inside, given to me when I was hired and in training.
Do any of you who continuously get the reports that cherry-pickers pass over ever

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). 



wrong, wrong, wrong. work is being outsourced because of $. period. not because of unqualified MTs
c
outsourced for sure
nm
I was outsourced and went to VR
because it was the same place I have typed for for over 15 years now. I am retirement age and really do not have to work as much nor do I want to work as much as I did years ago on straight, VR or anything. Having said that, VR on the work I do is like taking candy from a baby. I average about $25 an hour and only work part-time with my having cut my hours back. I am happy camper.
Is it possible that teaching can be outsourced?
the date is 2014, It a nice day. You drop off your kids to public school to for them to watch a huge plasma screen that has a teacher in it. And guess what... Its via Satellite, from India. Im getting goosebumps.... Arg. Its also outsourced. Oh im having a nightmare. I hope its its just a nightmare.
Must be a outsourced Company
Is that for real? Thats still 1750 lines
being outsourced to TRINIDAD!! NM
.
How many of those outsourced MTs have even seen snow??
:=
Department outsourced
After going through this 2 years ago I feel your pain. Though there are some positives to working at home it is a whole different ballgame. Personally I miss my coworkers and just the general atmosphere of the hospital. I keep hoping more hospitals will realize they still need some in-house staff, at the very least to do QA on what a lot of the services are turning out. It seems to me it has become nothing more than churn and burn with the emphasize on turn-around time, not quality. When I look up old reports in our system I am appalled at some of the stuff that goes out, and I am on accounts that require American MTs. It is really sad what this "profession" has become.

hospital outsourced...
Believe me I didn't leave by choice! I had a great job with amazing benefits, however our hospital started outsourceing 5 years ago and slowly but surely all the work dried up and our department faded away...

I avoided Focus Infomatics due to their offshoring, but now, I don't know, they are sounding pretty good. I just want eScription back. Anyone hiring? :)
They don't have in-house anymore - it's all outsourced.
I know because the service I work for does their work.  
An Outsourced Life -- anyone see that on MSNBC?

I didn't know whether to laugh or be disgusted, so I have decided to do both.


Just saw a story on MSNBC about some jerk (an American jerk, looks like the biggest geek in the world) who has outsourced all his worries to a Pakistan company and a young, pretty Pakistani girl named "Honey" takes care of answering all his emails for work, for home, for his family, etc.  Hired a second Pakistani woman, a middle-aged woman (forget her name) to handle his WIFE.  When his wife is upset with him or he with her, he emails this Pakistani woman and she handles it -- emails the wife and argues FOR this jerk.  Even picks out the gifts he gives his kids and wife.  OMG. 


What a stupidman for doing it and, I must say, a stupid woman for putting up with that. 


How's that for Americans outsourcing everything and sending it overseas?!



I wonder why when a department is outsourced/offshored sm
the physicians never have a say in it even though most of them don't like it?  They are the ones who bring in the revenue, after all, so why shouldn't they have a say in what goes on as regards patient care? 
That's because Dell's customer service is outsourced to India. sm

The guy probably answered yes, yes, yes to all your quesions and didn't understand a single word.


Sorry to hear that. All the hospitals that outsourced on me went with US-based companies and we were
nm
I'm there with ya! I worked for a hospital that outsourced overflow to a very large, VERY SM

well-known service.  The quality of the work was shockingly bad.  There's no way to describe it except to say it was painfully obvious that the MTs on our account had no business being MTs.  They didn't even have the very basic skills for the job, let alone the medical terminology.


I had the opportunity to read through the contract, and there was a paragraph in the contract that clearly stated that not only did the service promise to adhere to a specific TAT, but also promised high quality, proofread reports.  Basically saying that they employed a highly qualified QA staff that insured nearly error free reports.  That's the OUT clause as far as I'm concerned.  I started a file of every report with errors from the service, every ridiculous error.


A new supervisor for our department was hired and her first order of business was to cut the flab out of department.  She told us that the service doing our overflow was being paid something like $60,000 a MONTH!  The hospital was paying the service 45 cpl.  Now do the math!  The service gets 45 cpl and pays you and me 7 to 8 cpl to transcribe for them or even worse pays 2 cpl for an India-based MT and 3 cpl for an American QA person to edit and correct it, so that's only 5 cpl they end up paying.  That's quite a profit.  I vowed the day I found all this out to NEVER work for a national service again and especially not THAT service.


The new supervisor was against outsourcing which was good news.  She set out to renegotiate the contract or drop the service all together.  I threatened her with breach of contract and that's where my little file came in handy.  Needless to say, the service backed off and we not outsource overflow to a service local to our area and a much more reasonable rate.


My advice to you is start your file and keep track of everything.  Tell your boss to reread the contract, especially those paragraphs that speak to what the service promises to provide for the inflated line rate!


Good Luck!


In 5 years there won't be any transcription departments in any hospital. All will be outsourced.
Same thing happened to me and if those HIM hags who control our destiny think it's a good thing they are so WRONG.  Life has been hard since having to work at a service, and I refused to work for the Monster MTSO that took my job as a matter of principle.  I think we should all write to Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Amy Klobuchar (the MT in MN can write to her), etc., and express our strong needs to  have MT jobs and American information STAY in America with American MTs.   
YES, it's true, funding for schooling to replace outsourced jobs...sm
my husband is a machinist (was a machinist) in Illinois where manufacturing took a hard hit. They sent home a piece of paper with his pink slip about getting funding for schooling if the company was identified as having lost jobs due to overseas outsourcing. His company was too small to qualify but I went on the list and found many companies in the Chicago area that qualified. I even posted the info on the boards here about six months ago.
Total # of outsourced jobs? More less the population of 3 entire states!
Try to calculate that economic nightmare!!!
Check all the brands in other stores. It's all outsourced. Nike, Rebok, Liz Claiborne.
It leaves our country in the hands of the politicians who sold us out in the first place.
What an ugly thing to post. Your job could be outsourced tomorrow, sweetie. FYI...Job security
x
Millions others wish Bush would be outsourced too, as evidenced by the poll. Bush = 1st Class moron
     
Anyone know if coding would pay as well as MT? Is coding being outsourced too?
xx
I get my work from an FTP site that they load the work to, however I don't have pool work so to
speak, but I tell them how many minutes a day I want.  The work is generally put in my box by 5 pm every day, then I have until 10 am the following day for some priority work, or 3:30 pm for the rest, so TAT is not too bad. I would like to work less at night though, but I working on that. My downside is I do not get the same dictators day to day, there are a few I do on a semi-regular basis though, some generate great lines but take longer to do that other doc's and are not "money-makers", I also do not get paid for spaces so that hurts a bit too.  This is WP5.1 too.....so very antiquated but that is what the hospital uses, so not much choice there. But I understand what you mean about the C-phone. I was just doing another job with C-phone recently...they incidentally did not tell me how to get off of the system, which was very simple.  I'd finish a job, then hit stop and hangup if I wanted to get off or quit working.  That is what you need to do if you want to sleep, eat, etc.  Don't feel guilty, do what you signed up for, believe me they watch the pools and will get others to do the work you don't finish.  If they get on your case remind them that you are only PT and only want 500 lines a day, etc.  It's not worth killing yourself over.  Good Luck.
You go by your schedule and have no work. Everytime I get on to work, there is always work.
x
Then you would have no life at all except work, work, work if you did that. I wouldn't do it. nm
.
Same thing with nationals. You work all the time to keep the account caught up when others dont work
and then when they decide to put a whole lot of extra people on your accounts and run you out they could care less about how much you worked.
Have a hospital I work for and they consistently change work types and do line counts. (sm)
Management just doesn't understand in order to crank out the work you need to be proficient by typing the same accounts. Go figure, they just don't get it ??
Usually work "live" on a Cphone, while connected. There are ways to record & work off line, bu
s
steady work...gearing up to start new account....but there was no work on Tues as it was a holiday
Be patient with your eyes open....
I work for Warminster at MQ and I am sick to death of being jerked around with no work all the time.
I would like a job where I can depend on the work and it does not seem to be in this office of MQ.
Speaking of offshoring MT work, who does not directly send work offshore?
Just curious.  Has anyone got a list of companies who do not send work offshore?  Precyse?  MQ?  Spheris? 
Becky you work in a great place. With no one hovering, I bet you get a lot more work done w/o agoniz
wants what. The only people qualified to do QA on my reports are the dictating doctors and the rest is just pure waste of money and time. If I have a question fine. But this random QA bites and hurts everyone. BTW, I don't have random QA for those who seem to think I may have an ax to grind. No dog in this fight. Just common sense.
Good. Why dont you send some our way. What office do you work for so I can call and get your work.
:
Before needing to work, I did volunteer work through the Junior League where I am from in Texas. lm

Junior League was like a full-time job sometimes, but I loved it. Now that I have to work, even though it is from home, I still volunteer through my son's school.  I am a school teacher in my previous (pre-MT) life, so I volunteer my tutoring services for children who need the help beyond what the schools are able to provide but whose parents cannot afford to pay for private tutoring. I also know how you felt about being afraid.  I was strangely afraid before I joined the Junior League.  It was just the unknown. But I was SO blessed by being able to help.  Honestly, I am sure that it helped me just as much, if not more, than I helped others.  Go for it.  You won't be sorry.  (Just remember that you have to say NO when you have to say no, okay?  Remember that and you will be richly blessed by the experience!)


nm would you mind if I asked where you work and what type of work hosp, clinic ?
x
All I know is it caused the company I work for to be unable to do all work due today and the rest
:+
Just return the work, submit your bill, the scurry and find more work elsewhere. sm
They will never meet with you before next week. It is Thursday, already. Be prepared to sue for payment, because you will probably need to. But, most of all, find other work elsewhere, because I have a feeling this final payment will be a long time coming.
I work on Escription platform and the adapter didnt work for me. I tried it on my laptop though
and the foot pedal would just not play correctly with the adapter. I think others have tried it and done it but it just didnt work for me.
IC sets their own hours. As long as the work is done by the deadline, you decide when to work.

Glad I work somewhere where you cannot cherrypick....our work is divvied out by minutes and - sm

the office manager (who does not normally transcribe) dishes out the work, so some days are easy, others are a mix.  So no cherrypicking is possible.  You type up what is given to you, period.  She will alternate the tough one's out so no one person gets him/her all the time unless they want him/her and are used to that doc, or everyone gets a little piece, etc. There are days when I ask for easy work (tired, chemo day, Jen sick, or a lot going on, etc.) but not often, generally I get a mix but they all get easier the more you do them.  I am not working as much as I should be of course, every week is different here so I adjust my limited work schedule accordingly, so sometimes it hard to get better at certain docs.  I used to have a lot of blanks with the Trauma ER unit, but I have been doing that a lot lately and now and very good at it, still a time consuming account but at least I am improving. -----------------------  But I believe the OP was stating she did it to clear out the log, not to make more lines, and only when she was asked to do so.  At an old job I had #s meant everything, everyday we would get report (2=4 x a day) of the backlog, and emails pleading us to work, work, work.  The QA rules sucked  (MQ probably is basing their new plan loosly on this one), however we did not get penalized, just chewed out if you sent in too much work to QA (over 5%, and was 80% ESL), I would imagine eventually fired if you continued to do it. They were a great place to work for until they re-organized....it all went downhill from there.  This is why I prefer smaller MTSOs, it's not all about the #s, yes, they want production too but at least it's not so cut-throat. 


i used to work for a company that divided the work types up and i loved it. sm
there were only 4 of us working a major teaching hospital. someone was assigned surgery, different assigned discharges, different admits, etc. we all had the backup work type in case the original assignee wasn't available and were cross trained. it made us much more efficient, ability to get used to dictators, set macros, and in the long run we were all much happier.
Used to work in Cooperstown, NY - and on the way to work is a huge turkey farm
It made me never want to eat turkey again - seeing them all cramped up against the fence and cages, packed tightly, no room to move. Actually, it made me want to do some harm to the farmer who found this acceptable.
Do not work for Amherst if you can work for any other office in MQ. It is terrible. They overload
accounts terribly. We are always running out of work or need to have 8 or 9 backups to get lines in. This is the way it is. There may be a few out there that it is different but I do acute care and was just transferred there along with my office and everyone in my office is in the same boat. Not a good deal at all.
An MQ recruiter told me yesterday if work is low they "cut off" the work

SEs are doing it.  She also told me that it is written in MQ policies


that MQ can let go EMPLOYEES without notice (I'm not saying statutory employees here, I'm saying employees).


 


You're lucky they work for you. I've never gotten a refill to work right, ever.
x
Has anyone breast fed while trying to work at home, can you do this and still work full time?
It seems like the more literature I read on the subject, the longer it seems to take, especially in the beginning when you are breast feeding every two hours, or does it really just depend on the baby?