This blog is part of a series on transcription. If you haven’t read the other blogs in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all transcription blogs.
Pay for medical transcriptionists is the most complicated set-up I have ever seen. With general transcriptionists, they are paid per recorded minute (meaning that if the dictation is 10 minutes long, they get paid the going rate for 10 minutes, not however long the work actually took them to do.) With legal transcriptionists, they are paid per typed page, and there is an accepted format that each legal document is typed in (with standardized margins, font, font size, etc,) so that you can compare offers between LT companies without a problem.
Medical transcription is paid by the line. Which of course means you have to decide what a line is. Is it an actual physical line on a page, so that every single line, no matter how long
or short
is paid the same? Not in most cases. I have only heard of one transcription company that paid that way, and in almost every other way, this company would be considered archaic. No, I’m not naming names. 😉 So if you’re not counting physical lines, what are you counting? Many companies take a count of the characters in a document and divide that number by 55, 60, 65, 70, whatever they consider to be a line. The most common character count seems to reside somewhere around 65 characters, meaning that quite a few of the companies have decided that on average, a line is 65 characters long, and so they are going to take that as their standard.
Believe it or not, it actually gets even more complicated than that. The companies then have to decide if they’re going to pay for spaces or not. Even though a space is put into the document just like a regular letter or number is (by using a key on the keyboard to make it appear) some companies do not pay you for spaces. I have also heard of companies not paying for headings (PHYSICAL EXAMINATION) or some “special” characters. So a company can pay for a 70 character line with spaces, and another company can pay for a 55 character line without spaces, and you are left trying to figure out what is the best pay.
Is your head hurting yet? ‘Cause mine is.
The differences in the pay structure make comparing apples to apples almost completely impossible. They are handing you mangos and watermelons, and asking you to pick the best apple. Makes you want to kill the person who came up with this pay system.
The best advice I can give is to go to a medical transcription forum where a lot of MTs hang out on their off time, and ask them for their advice on which is the best offer. There are MTs out there who have been around for 30 years, and they can tell you the best way to go. As a vague starting point, a 65 character line with spaces is 7 cents per line for a newbie, most of the time, but of course that depends on the difficulty of the account (tight turnarounds or ESL–English as a Second Language–doctors should garner you a higher pay rate.)
While you are busy trying to figure out which mango looks the most like an apple, make sure to take into account the workload available at the company, which of course, my next blog just happens to cover in great detail. 😉 It’s nice how that works, isn’t it? See ya there!