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 I tell people that I have studied to become a medical transcriptionist, I usually get a blank stare. To avoid all blank stares with this series, I thought I would explain why transcription is so important and what role it plays in the different industries.
In the medical field, the doctor is the highest paid employee out of the whole hospital. No one would ever expect him to sit and answer phones, or send faxes, or type up notes. He needs to be in his office, seeing patients, so the hospital has something to bill for. The problem comes when insurance requires a record of what happened with each doctor visit. Doctors don’t get to just say, “I saw this patient today” and charge $100 for that. They have to say what the patient was complaining about, what the doctor examined, what the diagnosis was, what the treatment is going to be, and if there is going to be any follow-up visits for this patient. And if you think about every doctor visit, every emergency room visit, every surgery, every medical procedure, requiring this to be done, you can see how overwhelming this amount of work could be. Hospitals aren’t going to pay the doctor to sit after every examination and type up a page report on what happened–they need that doctor onto the next patient to make more money. It’s much easier and faster to give each doctor a handheld recorder and just tell them to say what they did with each patient, and then that recording can be given to someone else to be typed up and put into the chart.
And that’s where a transcriptionist comes in. Although a transcriptionist has the potential to make pretty good money ($20+ per hour) this is still much cheaper for the hospital to pay than to pay the doctor or the nurse to do this work.
Legal transcription works much the same way: It is a matter of economics, really. In a legal practice, the lawyer isn’t going to be sitting and typing up the transcripts of an affidavit. He has got to be racking up billing hours. It is much cheaper to pay someone else to do the typing.
General transcription is a very broad field (everything that isn’t legal and medical is general,) but for the most part, you are transcribing things like what happened in a focus group, a verbatim transcript of a stockholder’s meeting, or even just one person dictating their thoughts (although this isn’t nearly as popular as the first two.) It also encompasses transcribing TV shows, news broadcasts, and other entertainment information. At the end of a special on 20/20, etc, you’ll often hear, “For a copy of the transcript of this show, please call blah-blah.” That transcript is being typed up by general transcriptionists.
The need for transcriptionists is in almost every field, but some people believe that they are being replaced by machines (voice recognition technology.) For my thoughts on that, make sure to check out my next blog.