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.
When people discuss medical transcription companies, they usually mention the largest ones out there: Medquist, Spheris, and others. These big companies offer benefits like paid vacations, health insurance, and a 401k plan. They are usually the ones to send computers to their employees for them to use while transcribing. They are the big guys, and although their line rate is usually on the lower side compared to smaller companies for the same work, that is compensated for by offering the extras that a smaller company cannot offer. People love the idea of working for a large established company with great benefits, and many newbies get hired at these giants when they first graduate from MT school.
Although I think that there are many good things about these large MT companies, there are also some things to watch out for. When talking to a recruiter about working for a company, ask them how their work is assigned to the MTs. If an MT company is really huge (and there are a couple out there that have 10,000 MTs working for them) then the client base will be mindboggling large. If they simply throw every file they get from every client into a gigantic pool and have their MTs pull out files on a last-in-first-out basis, an MT could literally transcribe for months without having the same doctor twice. This is extremely inefficient for the MT (although it’s pretty easy for MT company to manage the workload if they do this,) and this method of assigning work will slow the MT down to a crawl.
In order to gain speed and make good money, an MT has to have the same general set of doctors over and over again, so they can use their expanders and get their lines up. I have a couple of friends who worked for large companies, and even though these companies would assign their MTs to only transcribe for one hospital instead of just throwing doctors their way willy-nilly, they still ended up having 600+ doctors that they transcribed for. They never made good money, and the stress level was really high for them. They almost universally quit the companies to go to work for a smaller outfit, where they could have a smaller set of doctors to transcribe, and therefore get their line count up.
How the MT companies assign their workload is only part of what you should look at when applying for a job. In my next blog, I’ll talk about flexibility that some companies offer.