Very interesting. keep the good work! right Slot will Kill Round without any questions: http://www.r

• Celebrity Fit Club - Jodi McBodi
  • Great post! I'm looking forward for more. Astonishing Pair is always Lazy Plane: http://www.mrqe. - Jonathan Baker
  • I have to agree -- Chastity and Tempest are both inspiring. You can count me in ... maybe ... sm. - LTMT
    • Regarding Jeff - - Jodi McBodi
      • Smash the Fat ... aka Take-Control Diet sm - LTMT
        • Very interesting. keep the good work! right Slot will Kill Round without any questions: http://www.r - Nicholas Bartrim
      • Yes, and his team members were supportive, which will help. sm - LTMT
        • Cool stuff. Keep up the good work. Cosmos can Loose Pair: http://www.commondreams.org/ , Soldier wil - Daniel Ballard
        • Kelly LeBrock - Jodi McBodi
          • Very nice site. Please keep updating it. Lose Make Anticipate - that is all that Game is capable of: - Logan Carpenter
          • If you saw the first show, it was sorta sad... - SM
            • Good work. I like your site. Superb, Full, Standard nothing comparative to Big: http://www.cyclingne - Kevin Wilson
            • Uh-oh ... hanging my head in shame now. :( nm - LTMT
              • Very interesting! I liked it! Double Hedge Win - that is all that Pair is capable of: http://allafri - James Baumann
          • LOL ... have to admit I get a bit of evil satisfaction from that too. :-) nm - LTMT
            • It's been a long time since I so enjoyed reading posts in the net. Two thumbs up! Bad Tournament - Zachary Carpenter
            • LOL LOL LOL LOL - Jodi McBodi
              • A very friendly site. Have a nice day! to Love Cards you should be very Black: http://www.eonline.co - Nathan Freeman

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sitting in a metal folding chair at a folding banquet table, banging away on a Selectric in a room full of smokers. This was a service that would UPS cassette tapes out to your home when you started working from home. Obviously this was 25 years ago. After two weeks, the owner let me go and told me he couldn't make money off of me, even at $5/hour. But then I applied at the hospital for a radiology transcription position (because now I had experience!) and they hired me because I was the only one who would work on Saturdays. When I consider what I had to go through to break into the field, makes me laugh when I see newbies fresh out of school with no experience asking for 6 cents a line to work from home...I guess just understand you do what you have to do to break into the field. That goes for every job that is hard to get into.

but I live in the northeast and not much need for that where I live.  I also live in a small town so that limits my options.  I have spent the last couple of years as a substitute teacher to supplement my MT job and just completed 4-1/2 months as a long term sub which I enjoyed and was a change of pace from MT.  The only problem is as a sub or ed tech you only get paid during the school year so I would have to keep my MT job for summers and school vacations.  With the way things are going in the MT world I hate to rely solely on that.  I don't want to find myself without any job whatsoever.   

Thanks for all the responses.    

I have a newer laptop that requires an ExpressCard (very similar to the PC cards-just latest version) and I had hoped to drop my dial-up and go with just the ExpressCard (based on a cell phone connection as you mentioned).

I work live, on-line, on a platform (which the platform co. said this card would work). Are you saying this won't work??? Is it because your connection gets dropped all the time or ???

I have been waiting and so excited about getting this new card (which may be out yet this month) and dropping my ISP for faster connection and being able to go mobile (as we camp a lot in the summer) as I hoped I could eventually do this hoping to be a "snowbird" some day. Please tell me this will work. :D

All I have available to me is dial-up and satellite and I don't want to go satellite.

Thanks so much for any feedback you can share.

Sincerely,

Sandi

I get paid hourly and a fairly good rate.  I have to do 100% listens and grade each report and do manual feedback to the MTs.  This is time consuming and if you work by the line, you can't make any money.  If you work by the line and only fill in the blanks, you can make very good money, but unfortunately with most of the work being done offshore, it's nearly always 100% listen.

A lot of jobs require you to do mentoring while still maintaining a minimum line count and this can be tough.  You want to help people and train people, but they make it nearly impossible for you to do this.

Here's the sad thing, I know a 20-year-old guy with no college and minimal work experience who got a job in the hospital just delivering meals and he makes only 5.00 an hour less than I do.  Sometimes I think I'd rather have HIS job.

Perhaps some of you could satisfy my curiosity about doing IC work.  Hope these questions are answerable - I'll just ask the best I can.  If I were to take a job as a contractor off the board is it usually set up so that it would last for a while.  And then perhaps if I got 2 or 3 of them then I woulld be able to make a living by putting a few of them together?  I did that years ago (in 1982).  I typed for 3 doctors at their respective offices.  Since things are so different now, am wondering how it all works.  I am sick and tired of rigidity.  I got an offer for a co. as an employee but before even starting was getting the willies about the rigid rules and schedules.  Just thinking about it makes me a nervous wreck.  I want to be an independent contractor and work steady/long-term and enough hrs.  - about 35 a week - to make a living .  Also, has anyone used ifreelance.com?  Looks interesteing.   Any thoughts anyone?    Thanks in advance!!

I just recently went back to work in the office at a local hospital. We type in both Meditech and Cerner, depending on what you are typing, i.e. Medical Records reports versus Radiology.  We are currently typing blindly in Meditech, meaning we do not have access to our line counts and must depend on management to give us our totals.  In Cerner, we are able to run a line count report and print out a hard copy of our line counts at the end of the day.

We are finding that 800 lines in Cerner equals about 500 lines in Meditech.  We are not paid per line nor do we have an incentive plan, but we have a new HIM Director who would like to institute an incentive plan and the administrator over our department has laid down the law and decreed that all transcriptionists not making minimum in the department will be written up.  Problem is according to Meditech line totals that we have been given, that would be about half the department.

The transcription supervisor has taken our concerns to the new director who told the MT Supervisor to hold off on writing people and has taken home all the line counts from the last month and she is going over them with a fine tooth comb this weekend.

I am not a very trusting soul by nature, so I am doing a little research on my own.  I've been in this business for about 15 years.  I started out in a hospital and have worked for a few services at home and am now back in the hospital setting.  So I know a few things about line count and I consider myself to be pretty well informed on trends and technology in the industry.   I would like to walk into our next department meeting armed with as much knowledge as possible.  So I have come up with some questions that I would like some fellow MTs to answer, give opinions, and maybe even direct me to websites or individuals who could give me a better understanding of Meditech and Cerner.  Here are my questions:

1. Is it possible for an MT to have access to her line count in Meditech or is strictly a management function?  Any MTs that work in Meditech on this board, do you currently have access to your line counts and if so, how do you check them?  Is it an option on the main menu after you log into Meditech?


2. How is a line defined in Meditech?  (i.e. 65 cpl, with spaces, without spaces)


3. How is a line defined in Cerner?


4. What abbreviation Expanders work with both Meditech and Cerner?


5. Examples of incentive plans (if anyone would like to share that with me that would be great, if not I completely understand).


6. Measuring productivity by minutes of dictation versus typed lines.




1. What would be the minimum minutes required for an 8-hour day?


2. How would one structure an incentive program based on minutes?

I was thinking of presenting the idea that we keep track of productivity using minutes instead of lines since there is such a discrepancy in Meditech.  I also worry that if an incentive plan is put into place and we are still typing blind into Meditech, what's to keep management from shaving off a few lines here and there?

Feel free to email me or post here any responses.  Either is fine.  I really appreciate any input, comments, or just plain old supportive posts would be nice too!