Medical Transcriptionist Training – Page 2 – Medical Transcription Basics

Category: Medical Transcriptionist Training (page 2 of 6)

What Is the Easy and Fast Way to Learn to Be a Medical Transcriptionist?

March 2, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

Why wait to get your career started longer than you need to? It makes sense to get your career going as fast as possible, but it’s not so easy to figure out how to do that when you want to become a medical transcriptionist. Is there any easy and fast way to learn to be a medical transcriptionist?

That depends on how you define easy and fast, not to mention the quality of training you expect. You want a good education, fast isn’t strictly what you’re going for. It may not be as fast if you take longer to get a job because your education wasn’t as good as it should have been.

I consider self paced medical transcription courses to be the best choice for those who want to get their career moving as fast as possible. This way the only thing slowing you down is you. If you need more time for study, you can take it. If you need less time because you already know part of the information, you can go faster. You don’t have to worry about how fast the other students are progressing. How long it takes you to complete your training is up to you.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy. Learning to be a medical transcriptionist isn’t easy for most people. There’s a lot of information to absorb, and it takes time build really good transcribing skills. Many terms sound similar but have very different meanings, and you must learn to tell them apart. You also need to understand the terminology well enough that you can help catch mistakes that could otherwise end up in the patient’s medical records. A good transcriptionist will note where the doctor needs to check the records when something doesn’t sound as though it was dictated correctly.

Getting into the easy and fast mindset is usually a mistake when you’re trying to train for any career. If it’s challenging enough that you have to get training on your own, it’s not going to be so easy that you can get it done in just a few weeks. If it were that simple, employers would be willing to do on the job training from scratch, and that just doesn’t happen in medical transcription. It takes too long to teach everything a medical transcriptionist must know and to learn all the skills you must have.

If speed and simplicity are the main criteria you consider when choosing a course, it’s not likely to do you a lot of good. While there’s good demand for medical transcriptionists, not every person who trains for it gets a job. Your training has to be good enough and you must be able to show that you gained the skills you need. Without that, your job hunt will be neither easy nor fast.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Is It a Good Idea to Go to School to Become a Medical Transcriptionist?

March 1, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

A career in medical transcription is interesting to a lot of people, but there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about the career as well. The idea that you might be able to work at home is appealing to a lot of people. Concerns about electronic records and voice recognition software make it less appealing. Is going to school to become a medical transcriptionist a good idea? Is it still worth it?

You absolutely need to consider the future of medical transcription. It’s extremely relevant even when you’re training up for your first job. Good training will allow you to consider what’s happening within this industry.

It must first be noted, however, that there are still a lot of jobs out there for traditional medical transcriptionists. It has not vanished, and won’t for some time. Electronic medical records don’t automatically end the need, and not all doctors use voice recognition software. It takes time to make those changes.

Those won’t entirely do away with the need for medical transcriptionists anyhow, and if you have the right training you might just be able to take advantage of that. Places that don’t need medical transcriptionists because they’ve gone all electronic may still need help with their medical records, with transcriptionists working in an editing capacity. You’d be catching the errors the software makes in the record, and make no mistake, they will be there. Voice recognition is far from perfect.

Paying attention to where the industry is going is how you make your schooling worth it even if you don’t specifically take medical editor training. You may prefer to do the basic medical transcriptionist training to start, then add in medical editor training once you have some experience. A medical editor will still need to know how to do the work of a medical transcriptionist in order to do that work accurately. Such jobs will keep being out there for some time; the U.S. Department of Labor expects medical transcription jobs to grow by 11% by 2018. This could change as it’s only a forecast, but it is a good indication that the jobs aren’t going away too soon.

There is one more thing to consider when you’re wondering if going to school to become a medical transcriptionist is a good plan. That’s your own dedication to your training. It won’t be worthwhile if you aren’t a serious student. Taking classes isn’t a magic pass to a job. You have to gain the skills. You have to do hours and hours of practice transcription from real doctor dictation. You must learn the vocabulary. If all you want is to get through the classes fast, they might not be the best choice. You’re better off if you plan to take the time you need to learn all the skills.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

How Can You Get Free Training for Medical Transcription?

March 1, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

Lots of people want to get a fast start when they decide to work in medical transcription. The only problem is that it’s not possible without training. When you’re looking for a new way to earn a living, having to pay for training isn’t exactly the most welcome thing. Can you get free training for medical transcription?

I’m sorry to say it doesn’t work like that, especially if you don’t want to fall for a work at home scam.

The way the free training for medical transcription scam usually works is they tell you the training is free once you pay them a few hundred dollars for the software you need. It must be their software. Once you have it, they’ll start training you.

The software may or may not work. Worse, the training they provide will not be good enough to get you work as a medical transcriptionist.

Sometimes they’ll say it’s on the job training, and that once you’re well enough trained you’ll become a paid employee. They’ll keep you working at it as long as you’re willing to stick around, but your work will never be good enough that you’ll get paid.

There are some things in life that are absolutely worth paying for even if you wish you could have them for free. Medical transcriptionist training is one of those things.

It’s really just like many other careers where you need to go to college or a vocational school in order to get that first job. It’s very rare for self trained people to make it on their own. Most people need that formal training and most employers want to see it before they will so much as consider hiring you. They need to know that you will be a capable transcriptionist and not need constant hand holding to do your work, especially if you become a home based medical transcriber.

Good online training in medical transcription is worth it in another way if you get a job that pays on production, as many at home positions do. The better you know how to do the work, the faster you can transcribe accurately, the more you’re going to earn. Knowing the job well is a huge advantage, and it’s not one you’re likely to have if you go for free training or try to train yourself.

Take some time when you’re choosing your medical transcriptionist training so that you get the benefits when you start working. Free isn’t worth it if you can’t find work after your training.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

What Are the Best Medical Transcriptionist Online Classes Available?

February 28, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

It takes solid training to become a medical transcriptionist. It’s not something many people get to just learn on the job. You have to take the initiative and go to classes to learn it on your own. That makes it important to find the best medical transcriptionist online classes you can. Where are they?

First you have to know which criteria you should be considering when looking at online medical transcriptionist classes. You need to be able to sort out which are good versus which are more about getting you to pay for their classes with little regard for how your career goes after.

You should expect a great deal of training in medical terminology, anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, medical report formatting, ethics and more. These are the basic things you will need to know in order to work in medical transcription. Some of it is quite complex, and it takes time to learn it all.

You’ll also do a number of hours of real doctor dictation in any good program. This is one of the most important parts. You can know the terminology, but if you haven’t transcribed it, you don’t realize how different it can all sound depending on how the doctor says it.

It’s not just about accents, although that certainly plays a role. Doctors usually speak quickly when doing their dictation. They want to get it out of their way. They may also eat as they dictate, drive a car, and so forth. The dictation is not always their only focus at the moment. It takes a lot of practice to not only understand what they’re saying, but to transcribe it accurately and quickly.

Just a few hours will not be enough. The amount of practice needed may seem excessive when you first start, but it’s necessary. This is the major skill you bring to the job, and it’s why nurses and other medical professionals often still need to take classes in order to become medical transcriptionists themselves.

How long the course is expected to take overall matters too. It shouldn’t be short. A mere eight weeks really isn’t enough, not by the time you add in the hours needed to really practice transcribing. You can learn a lot in that time, but you won’t have learned enough. Expect a minimum of four months, but accept that a self paced course may well take you nine months or even a year to complete. That’s not at all unusual.

Cost matters to most of us as well. A good course is not cheap. $1800 isn’t unusual, and many courses cost more. This is not something to go too cheap with. Just remember that the quality of training you get will help to pay back the investment you make in your training. Work hard in your classes, find that first job, and you’ll earn it back in a reasonable time period. It’s still less than the cost of many colleges for a year.

Finally, make sure you check the reputation of the school in the medical transcription field. It doesn’t matter if they’re great elsewhere – how well will you be trained for the job you’re after? You want the best you can find in that area.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Where Are the Certified Online Courses to Become a Medical Transcriptionist?

February 25, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

Figuring out how to become a medical transcriptionist can be a bit confusing. Sometimes people are surprised to find out that they have to pay for training to get into this career. Once they get past that, the next question is very natural. Where are the certified online courses to become a medical transcriptionist?

A search online can add to the confusion. There are a number of schools out there, and of course they’re all trying to look good to you. Probably several are good, but you don’t know how to check them to see if they’re certified or otherwise a good program to teach you how to become a medical transcriptionist.

Certification isn’t precisely what you’re looking for, however. It’s too easy for a course to say that it’s certified or accredited in this way or that. I much prefer to suggest that you consider AHDI Approval, as it is entirely about the medical transcription training course, not about anything else the school may teach. AHDI considers several factors to determine whether a medical transcription training course is offering the right sort of training to prepare students to work in medical transcription.

It’s pretty easy to find out which courses have this. They’re listed on the AHDI website.

You can check the websites of different schools and request printed information from them. This can help you to figure out which one is going to work out well for you. You’ll want to balance the quality of the course with what you can afford to pay for it. These kinds of courses aren’t precisely cheap, but when you compare them to what you could be earning once you start working as a medical transcriptionist, they usually aren’t all that unreasonable. It’s an investment in your career.

As with any other sort of investment, make sure you do so wisely. Don’t feel you have to go for the first online course you hear about. It might be the right one for you, but it might not be. It is possible to choose a school that advertises its courses well but doesn’t really give you the training you need to do the work and doesn’t have the trust of potential employers to help you get past the experience requirements. The time you spend doing a touch of research on your options will help you to avoid such mistakes.

Just remember that it’s not certification as such that makes an online course worth taking. It’s whether or not you’re likely to gain the skills you need to work as a medical transcriptionist that matters.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Can You Get Your Medical Transcriptionist Certificate Online?

February 24, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

The one problem with trying to start your career in medical transcription is having to get the training required. Going back to school isn’t convenient for a lot of people. There are too many things you have to do in your life, and working school into that is difficult. This is why it’s a great idea to get your medical transcriptionist certificate online.

To make things very clear right from the start, this is not about becoming a Certified Medical Transcriptionist, or CMT. That’s entirely different from getting a certificate from an online training course. You can only get your CMT after a minimum of two years of experience in acute care medical transcription, and only through AHDI.

A lot of schools offer a certificate to show you’ve completed your course. Too often students and graduates assume that this makes them a CMT, but it doesn’t. Employers know that and you’re better off if you know that too. A certificate from a school is more like a diploma. It just says you completed the coursework required to graduate.

There are a few good training programs for medical transcription you can take online. You want to take a good look at the program you’re considering because there’s also a lot of very poor quality programs out there. There’s no point wasting time or money on a course that won’t give you the training you need to become a medical transcriptionist, no matter what they say about the certificate they give you after.

A good training program will have a good reputation with medical transcription employers. The coursework will be challenging, teaching you quite a bit of medical terminology and other information you will need to know in order to transcribe. It will also include many hours of real doctor dictation for you to practice on, building up your skills as a medical transcriptionist.

You should plan on taking six months or more to complete the training. A few will finish sooner, maybe as little as four months, but it depends on how quickly you pick up the information and how much time you can dedicate to your training. Some take nine months, others over a year.

On the plus side, most online medical transcriptionist training programs are self paced. If you need to take a bit more time or a bit less, you can do it. So long as you learn the material and gain the skills, you’ll be in good shape.

Self paced training programs are great when you have work or other obligations. You can work around them, study nights, study early mornings, whatever works for you. No parking hassle to get to class either. You work on assignments on your own schedule and contact teachers as you need them.

There are risks to any sort of self paced online training programs, beyond just the possibility of quality issues. You’re the one responsible for scheduling your work. If you don’t get your coursework done in a reasonable time frame, you can run out of what the school allows for the entire course to be completed. That’s the big limit to these types of courses, but it’s usually quite reasonable and very possible for any committed student to finish the training. Get it done and you’re have your medical transcriptionist certificate, diploma or whatever you care to call it.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Which Online School Is Best for a Medical Transcriptionist Diploma?

February 23, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

If you want to get into medical transcription, you’re going to need to get an education in it first. There’s a lot you have to know, and it’s a challenging career. You want to find the best online school to get your medical transcriptionist diploma.

There are several good choices available to future online medical transcription students. Once you know how to tell which are good, you can pick from them and decide which is the best for you.

The most important thing you get from an online school is not your medical transcriptionist diploma. It’s the skills to work as a medical transcriptionist. If you don’t really develop those skills well, the diploma is nothing more than a piece of paper.

Also important is the reputation of the online school with potential employers. It doesn’t matter how dedicated a student you were or how well you learned to transcribe medical records, if employers have had too many bad experiences hiring graduates of a particular school your odds of getting a job at that company goes way down. You want to go to a school that has the trust of many employers.

The program should teach you many of the basics first, such as medical terminology, anatomy, physiology and so forth. You can’t rely on a spell checker too much when you’re a medical transcriptionist, so all these things must be familiar, not just so that you spell them correctly, but so that you can hear the doctor say them and transcribe the report correctly. Many medical terms sound extremely similar to one another, and you must understand them well enough to catch the difference and to know if the doctor may have made a mistake in his dictation.

That’s only a part of what the school must teach you. They must also have you transcribe many hours of real doctor dictation for practice. This is where you learn how to put it all together into the medical record. You learn all about how to do this in the other parts of your training, but without a lot of practice you aren’t going to be prepared to do this in real life.

Cost has to be a factor for most of us. There aren’t many who can just pick a school with no thought to expense. There are very limited options for financial aid as a rule, since most programs don’t qualify for the usual financial aid programs.

You can just go with the most expensive school, but that’s not necessarily the best bet. Price isn’t everything. Make sure that if you go with an expensive school that the quality is worth the expense.

Don’t go for the cheapest either, although I would hope that would be obvious. It’s not cheap running a good online medical transcriptionist school. Too cheap means the school is probably lacking in some way.

Many schools will offer some sort of payment plan even if they don’t have other sorts of financial aid. There may also be benefits to paying the entire expense at once. Figure out what will work for you.

With some research into these factors you should be able to narrow down the field and pick the right online medical transcriptionist school for your needs. Once you’ve signed up, it’s up to you to make it through the classes and become a medical transcriptionist.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Where Can I Study Medical Transcription Online Quickly?

February 20, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

The need to study medical transcription before you can get a job as a medical transcriptionist can be frustrating, especially if you think that all you have to do is type up what the doctor says, or you feel you have a solid enough medical background that you know enough to plunge straight into your career. There’s certainly a kernel of truth to such perspectives, but that doesn’t change the need to learn more than you think you need to. The larger part of being a medical transcriptionist is more complex than many others realize.

That doesn’t mean you’re entirely wrong to want to study medical transcription online quickly. If you can handle the speed and really learn everything a medical transcriptionist needs to learn, go for it. But don’t take a course saying you only need eight weeks or something. Take a self paced online medical transcriptionist course and see how long it takes you.

If you can finish it quickly and do the work well, wonderful! Most times it will still take at least four months to complete a self paced course, but at least you aren’t having to wait for classmates to catch up with you, or for an instructor who won’t let you work ahead even when you’re ready to go. The parts you know you can go through quickly. The parts that are less familiar and more challenging you can take the time you need.

Your typical reputable medical transcription course online won’t promise you that you can finish it all that quickly. There’s a wide range of times that are considered normal in a good, self paced course. The fast students or ones with some medical background may finish in four months or so. Students with less time to work on their school work or who don’t pick up the skills so quickly may take nine months, a year or more to get it all done.

The beauty of self paced courses is that it doesn’t matter which sort of student you are, and if something slows you down for a little, as life has a way of doing, you can keep going as time permits. So long as you don’t go past the time frame allowed by the school for completing the course overall, you should be in good shape.

The simple truth is that some parts of the curriculum will take a significant amount of time. There’s only so much you can do about the amount of time required for transcription practice. It’s one of the biggest parts of the online course, and very time consuming. It’s a vital skill to your eventual success as a medical transcriptionist, and not one to be skimped on while you train, especially as it may relate to what you earn. Per line pay rates are quite common in medical transcription, and if you didn’t master the skill, you aren’t going to earn that much.

Remember, you’re training for a new career. You want to impress whichever employers you end up applying with. You won’t impress anyone if you rush through your training so fast that you don’t learn the skills a medical transcriptionist must have.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Which Online Colleges for Medical Transcription Are the Best Value for the Money?

February 19, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

No one wants to waste money on their education. You pay for college, you want to get something out of it. When it comes to learning medical transcription, however, not all colleges are worth it. Which online colleges for medical transcription give you the best value?

It takes a bit of research to find out. There are a few factors that will help you discover which colleges have a good reputation as a school and with employers. It’s that good reputation that will help you get your first medical transcriptionist job, combined with how well you do in your studies.

One way to check how employers feel about a college is to see if they regularly hire graduates from that college. Some will list employers that have hired their graduates on their sites, but you can also try contacting employers. Just remember that this does not guarantee that you will ever be offered a position with that employer, no matter how well you do in your studies. It also depends on if they’re hiring at the time and what your competition for the openings looks like.

The big national medical transcription services are some of the easiest employers to check with. They hire a lot more people, and so deal with a lot more graduates from whichever program you’re looking at.

The AHDI is another place to check. They have some colleges on their Approved list, which means the college offers what they consider to be a good training program. The college has gone through a review process with them and passed all the criteria, which go over course content, the inclusion of an experienced medical transcriptionist in the program, and other factors they believe go into making a college worth approving, and worthwhile for students to attend to learn medical transcription.

You should also consider whether the college allows you to go at your own pace, especially if the courses are offered online. Being able to go at your own pace is a huge help, especially if you’re working elsewhere at the same time. You can go faster or slower as your schedule permits. You don’t have to worry about getting to class on time.

You do have to make sure that you’re still getting the work done in a timely manner if you use a self paced training program. Go too slow and you can eventually run out of time. Colleges do not just keep you as a student until you’re done. There’s a time limit that should be plenty generous enough for the serious student, even if you work elsewhere at the same time. Set aside a couple hours several days a week at least, just as you would for a college class you would attend in person. If you aren’t doing any other work, try treating your studies as a full time job.

When you get right down to it, there are a few online colleges that will give you good value for your money. Even the best won’t give you good value unless you work at it. Don’t expect learning medical transcription to be a simple thing. It takes time and a lot of effort. Give yourself the time you need to really learn what they’re teaching you so that you make the most of your time and the money you’ve spent.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

How to Look Into Online Courses to Become a Medical Transcriptionist

February 17, 2011 / Stephanie / Comments Off

Taking an online course to become a medical transcriptionist is one of the best ways to get started in this industry. The challenge comes in figuring out which online courses are worth taking, and which should be dropped from consideration. All the schools do their best to sound appealing, but not every school is even close to worth it.

If you want to know which ones are worth it, you need to do a bit of investigating. There are a couple of ways you can find and choose a course.

Signing up for a medical transcriptionist course without doing your research is risky. The internet makes it very easy for someone to set up what looks like a good school when it’s really a one or two person operation, poorly developed training materials, and no record of successfully training students into medical transcriptionists that an employer would hire.

At the same time, there are a number of really great online courses available to medical transcription students. Many of the best medical transcription schools are 100% online. Online courses are great for teaching you how to do the work without direct supervision, and the self paced nature of many online courses means you can fit it into your schedule more easily than classes you have to attend in person.

Employers are a pretty good place to start. If potential employers regularly hire graduates from a particular program, you can pretty well assume they’re doing a good job of teaching. Employers are quick to note when a source of employees is more trouble than it’s worth.

You can also check with the AHDI. You don’t want the school to just be a member of AHDI, you want them to be one of the Approved schools that they list on their website. That means the program has been reviewed in terms of the training in medical transcription it gives. They don’t approve schools easily.

You can look through the resources the school itself makes available to potential students. They will of course make themselves look good, but you can tell a lot about the school’s offerings, such as if a student forum is available, if a payment plan is available, and how much help they’ll give you after graduation to find that first job.

Once you’ve done your research and found a really great medical transcription online course, there’s one more very important thing to remember. You absolutely must remember that the best training course online can do nothing without you. If you aren’t a dedicated, hardworking student, you’re never going to learn the skills you need in order to succeed as a medical transcriptionist.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Medical Transcription Basics

Medical transcription training and schooling tips

Category: Medical Transcriptionist Training (page 2 of 6)

What Is the Easy and Fast Way to Learn to Be a Medical Transcriptionist?

Is It a Good Idea to Go to School to Become a Medical Transcriptionist?

How Can You Get Free Training for Medical Transcription?

What Are the Best Medical Transcriptionist Online Classes Available?

Where Are the Certified Online Courses to Become a Medical Transcriptionist?

Can You Get Your Medical Transcriptionist Certificate Online?

Which Online School Is Best for a Medical Transcriptionist Diploma?

Where Can I Study Medical Transcription Online Quickly?

Which Online Colleges for Medical Transcription Are the Best Value for the Money?

How to Look Into Online Courses to Become a Medical Transcriptionist

Medical Transcription Resources

Choose Your Medical Transcriptionist Training

Top Medical Transcriptionist Training Articles