I did a medical transcription series a while ago, and I thought I had covered all of the questions I could think of, but I missed a couple which kept being asked over and over again, so I tackled those and now I wanted to tackle a question I realized I never answered: Is the Medical Transcription field being outsourced overseas?
Yes.
I apologize to anyone who was hoping to get a better answer than that, but unfortunately, that’s the only answer I can give, because that’s exactly what’s happening. The American MT world went through a bust a few years back because people started figuring out that now that the Internet is here, and transcriptionists don’t have to transcribe off of tapes like they used to (with tapes, you were limited on who could work for an MT company because the tapes had to be dropped off and picked up every day, meaning only local transcriptionists could do the work) this meant that not only could transcriptionists do the work of a company across the country, but also around the world. And transcriptionists who live in India work for a heck of a lot cheaper rate than the transcriptionists who live in America. That’s a fact. The cost of living in India is so much lower than America that there isn’t any way an American can compete, price-wise.
So the work started getting sent overseas in droves, and the pay being offered to new transcriptionists graduating from American schools dropped dramatically over the course of several years. People started bemoaning the end of medical transcription in America, and I have talked to more than a few people who said that they either dropped out of school or they didn’t enroll in the first place because they didn’t figure there would be any work for them to do when they graduated.
Fortunately, this is where the story starts to get a little better. Doctors and hospitals started to realize that the work being turned in by India transcriptionists was not up to par. The grammar, the punctuation, and the difficulty in getting medical terms correct led to a lot of problems. Companies started having to hire American transcriptionists to edit and fix the transcripts turned in by Indian transcriptionists, raising the cost of those transcripts by quite a bit, which meant that the savings of sending the work overseas turned out to be very minimal. Then concerns over security started popping up as reports of a Pakistani woman trying to blackmail a hospital hit the newsstands.
Read on to Part Two, where I discuss the state of the MT field today…