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. If you missed Part One, check it out here.
Again, here’s Laura, describing her typical day working as a QA gal:
I’m lucky because my company makes sure they do not over-hire on their accounts, which means that it is very rare to get on and not find any work that needs to be done. This means that we’ll sometimes get a bit behind, but not too often. It seems to work out just right, the balance between MTs on the accounts and the amount of work in the accounts. Once in a great while, usually around a major holiday, work might be light when doctors take their vacations, but even then, many MTs take vacations at that time, so the work balances out again.
Overall, I think most MTs are going to run into some pretty bad dictators at some point. We have one at my company who is very difficult to understand. He has a very thick accent, and he has a tendency to speak very fast. That combined with his thick accent makes it extremely difficult to transcribe his work.
Sometimes I have to get up and walk away for a few minutes if I have a long report by him just to keep my sanity! Now that I am doing QA, I have access to the actual patients’ charts that the MTs do not have access to. This helps if you cannot understand medications, diagnoses, lab work, and imaging studies. Most of this information can be found in the patients’ charts on the system. Of course, that doesn’t help when you can’t understand something that isn’t included on the charts, but the hospital knows who the bad dictators are, and they are very understanding when it comes to blanks for particular doctors.
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That’s it from Laura! She’s a sweetie for taking the time to do this for me, so my thanks to her for that. If anyone has any questions for Laura, please leave them in the comment section below, or send me an e-mail at Hava L {at} Families dot com.
Well, this is well and truly the end of the medical transcription series. I won’t be back tomorrow with another encore, I promise, unless a comment is left pointing out something drastically large that I left out. I think I’ve covered everything I wanted to, though, so I think we’re set to move on to legal transcription.
I did want to let people know that the medical, legal, and general field have a lot in common (like using expanders, QA personnel, working on weekends, and dealing with difficult dictation.) So from here on out, my focus won’t be quite as intense, because much of what needs to be said about the field in general has already been covered. You’ll notice that there will be a lot less blogs about the legal and general field than I did on the medical field, and that is the main reason. It is also because out of the three, the medical field is the most established, employs the most people, and has the most companies. There was just more ground to cover in the medical field than there will be in the general and legal field. So please don’t think I’m “shortchanging” those two fields by not writing as much on them.
Thank for reading!