Medical Transcription as a Career

Whether you are a stay at home mom interested in earning a decent income without having to leave your kids at daycare or a retired professional looking for constructive ways to spend your time, medical transcription offers exciting possibilities for people in search of flexible work-at-home opportunities.

Before we delve deeper into the how's and why's of the profession, let's take a step back and understand the origins of medical transcription.

All over the world, doctors routinely perform a number of procedures on patients that have to be duly documented for a variety of reasons, one of them being insurance claims settlement.

Physicians, pressed as they are for time, cannot be expected to spend countless hours documenting reports and this is where a medical transcriptionist steps in. A medical transcriptionist listens to recorded dictations by physicians and other direct healthcare providers and converts it into clear and concise written text.

This text could be medical reports; letters, memos or other types of communication material; and administrative data.

While it's true that a lot of medical transcriptionists work from home, this in no way means it is a low skilled job that anyone can take a shot at.

Not only does it require excellent typing skills and proficiency in grammar, but medical transcriptionists should also complete proper vocational training and get appropriate certification if they want to find employment.

Only through proper medical transcription training will they be able to understand medical terminology, interpret and translate medical parlance into understandable text while adhering to the prevailing ethics and legal requirements of maintaining medical records.

Medical transcriptionists should also be able to proofread documents for errors and inaccuracies and format them into specific styles.

Medical transcriptionists need to be familiar with the various methods used by healthcare professionals to transmit dictations for transcription.

On one hand are the traditional methods of transcription that involve the use of micro cassette tapes or Dictaphone machines, while on the other side are modern innovations like voice recognition software.

Although a fairly recent development in the medical transcription industry, voice recognition software is fast gaining popularity as it drastically cuts down the labor required in typing the entire transcripts by converting sound into ready text. This text is then interpreted, edited, rewritten and formatted by the medical transcriptionist.

Although a lot of medical transcription work is outsourced to countries like India with its large English-speaking population, this hasn't really dried up the demand for medical transcriptionists in the country.

According to the 2010-11 edition of the Department of Labor's Occupational Outlook Handbook, the job opportunities for trained and certified medical transcriptionists continue to be good. Further, it projects an 11 percent growth in employment of medical transcriptionists through 2018.*

As far as compensation is conce ed, medical transcriptionists can earn anywhere between $10 to $18.98 per hour.*

If working from home isn't exactly your cup of tea, there are ample employment opportunities ready to be explored at doctors' offices, laboratories, hospitals, clinics and healthcare support service providers.

So, if this unique and flexible profession excites you, go ahead and enroll yourself in an online vocational training program today and be on your way to conquer the world of medical transcription!