Should You Pursue a Medical Transcription Career?

The Information Technology boom has added a new flavor to every aspect of life. Be it restaurants, educational institutes, the insurance or transportation industries or medical facilities and hospitals. With the growing number of IT trained personnel and the spreading of the IT revolution into routine life, the medical field has come to accept the role of technology in its processing.

By the same token, Medical Transcription, too is a fast growing aspect of the medical career field. The role of a medical transcriptionist is to listen to the voice recordings of qualified doctors and nurses and then transcribe them to a digital format that includes medical reports, graphs or charts.

With the evolution of the Internet, the world has shrunk considerably. Now it's possible for a distance of 1000 miles to exist between a patient and the doctor who is treating him. There are more and more job openings in the field of medical transcription every day.

People are encouraged to join the transcription field though promotions, advertisements, an abundance of books on the matter and because of the lure of a flexible work culture. Although most of the advertisements are a mere hoax to promote and sell books on medical transcription, there are quite a few genuine ones that offer you a legitimate job in the field.

The job field of a medical transcriptionist is normally in actual hospitals (usually dealing with huge number of patients), in a private doctor's office, visiting clinics, or other outpatient medical care facility resorts. There are innumerable jobs in testing labs, medical schools or even private third-party transcription services. A trained person can even work as an independent or in a home-based office offering his services as an affiliated medical transcriptionist.

Since medical transcription is a job based on medical research and facilities, it requires a formal degree in the field of medicine, or dedicated training that imparts knowledge of the medical lingo and other medical processes to the potential transcriptionist. Due to the possibility of working from home this field is much sought after.

While being home-based has its benefits, it has its challenges as well. This includes being able to follow a strict regimen as far as time is concerned and having to manage all the accounts and taxes on your own.

A medical transcriptionist basically has to transcribe what he hears. These notes are then put into forms and sent over directly to the patient or his local consultant. The medical transcriptionist's job requires good listening skills due to the complexity of medical terminology. Some terms may sound the same, but have different meanings depending upon the context in which it is used.

The most crucial are the final results of transcription work which must be 100% accurate, since this work is what is used to document a patient's medical history. In many cases a medical transcriptionist's work is utilized during certain legal proceedings. Since legal matters can hinge entirely on the accuracy of the transcriptions, absolute perfection is required in the transcription reports.

After the outcome of the legal proceedings or any discrepancy, irrespective of outcomes, all transcripts generally become a matter of public record. The reputation of the doctor, patient, employer and the transcriptionist is at stake where every document is concerned.