You are an exception to the rule. After 20 years, I'd like to be making

• Don't mind me...just a lowly MT... - Broke MT
  • Time to switch careers. I did and life is much less stressful. - nm
  • Thanks for your input..... - Broke MT
  • I support myself with just one company right now - Right now
  • Can't say I make a great living, but... - passing through
    • You are an exception to the rule. After 20 years, I'd like to be making - an easy 50G yearly
      • Not easy 50K - Patti
        • I made $13,000 last year - anon
        • Patti...you are an MTSO? - Broke MT
          • Yes - Patti
            • I do!! - Broke MT
        • Not easy work at all. - Such responsibility.
  • RE: - 1111
    • 2222 - Broke MT
      • at least $50 g - texan
        • to patti and texan, how many accts? sm - workinfool
          • Accounts - Patti

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I feel like I can't get out of this rut of making enough money to just pay my bills and nothing left over.  What would you say the average annual salary should be after 2 years of acute care work?

Thanks

We got one hour of PTO (paid time off) for every 10 hours worked, so that's just a little less than 3 weeks a year. We had a 401K that was pretty decent, good health insurance, life insurance equal to two years' pay, and they offered AFLAC and disability insurance as well.

Oklahoma's cost of living is among the lowest in the nation....I don't know how people living in California can make it on $8-$12/hr.

Now it seems, I'm just scraping by, juggling the utility bills and paying whichever one has sent me the 24-hour disconnect notice this month; it's become a grim miserable job compared to what it was.  I'm nearing retirement age, but I doubt retirement is going to be in my future for a very long time.

The single worst thing that ever happened to us was going from the gross line count to the character count, and not adjusting the line rate upward to parity -- not to mention the adjustments that should have been made to accommodate all the extra time spent struggling to make sense of huge increase in ESL dictations that has occurred over the last 15 years, and of course there should have been COLAs as well, which we all know has not happened.

In the 1980s, with the advent of powerful and affordable PCs, free lance transcription became much more common.  So if you were experienced, disciplined and organized, you could be much better off economically by working for yourself -- although there were definitely advantages to working in-hospital.  There were great benefits and the salary was indeed enough to support a small family (albeit very modestly.) 

For a number of years during that time, many of us worked part time in the hospital for benefits, but made our real money at home.

But in my case, the time came when it just made no economic sense to work in-housel, I was better buying off buying private insurance for major medical care, tax-deferred annuities, and self-insuring the little stuff. 

I would just pick up tapes from the hospital every morning, and drop off the work (which I printed out) from the day before.

I usually had 24 hours to transcribe tapes which I did during school hours, when things were peaceful and quiet. 

I transcribed a couple thousand GROSS lines day.  Every single character line counted, so by taking advantage of headers/footers, creative macros, word expansions, etc., I really boosted my productivity far beyond to what I could do in-house on the self-correcting Selectric, Wang or Mag Card, or whatever 10-years behind technology was currently being used, plus all the office distractions and politics, and I definitely did not to have to work 24/7 to earn a good living. (Oh how I loved WP5.1!)

In fact, 2000 gross lines a day, 5 days a week at 10 cents a line (courier 10-pitch font, one-inch margins) was very very do-able for an experienced productive acute-care MT, provided she had good equipment, good reference books, and stayed focused.  It would take about 5-6 hours a day to get that amount of work done.  So figure the math out for yourselves, that's just a tad under $50,000 a year, certainly not a high standard of living in those days but adequate when it meant you could stay home and be actually be a full time parent when your children were home from school, and very comfortable, if you were married with a working spouse, or had rerliable child support, or social security for your children (if you were widowed.)

If you chose to work some weekends and evenings, it was not that all that difficult to hit that $75,000 a year mark, which I did for a couple of years so I was able to pay the tuition at a good boarding school -- and cruelly thwarted my teen-aged son's only ambition in life, which was to become a high school drop-out.

Things have gotten bad, no doubt about that, and the worst part of it is, is that most of the big MTSOs are still charging the hospitals as much as we used to earn, and sometimes even more, but the MT is no longer earning it, and often can't get enough work to meet the line counts required by the MTSOs for benefits (although the cost of those benefits are reflected in the cost charged to the hospital.) 

I don't know what the answer is, as the electronic immigrant is such a huge threat.

It's pretty darn awful, and I feel very very bad for those of you starting out in this field, and I do hope things change for you (and that someday soon I can retire.)

And the point that the person made is that that she was worth $75,000 a year, not necessarily that she was getting it or could get it, and I absolutely agree with her.  This is a hard tough job if it's done right -- it's mentally tiring, it's hard on your back, your hands, your neck (and your behind.)

It requires a lot of time -- it requires focus, you must stay alert, and must give 100% of your attention to what you are doing 100% of the time, it takes education and brains -- and now a word of truth which my 35+ years experience gives me the right to say aloud -- it's not fulfilling, wonderful, lovable and enjoyable, it's often as repetitious and tedious as an assembly line but infinitely more frustrating.

PS: I recall one of my colleagues from those early years of my career, now gone from this earth, telling me that the 1960s were really the "fat" years, that things actually began to decline salary-wise, in real dollars, in the 1970s. 

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

The original poster was right, obviously LOTS of people here don't make that kind of money for their talents.

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!