Medical Transcription Basics

Medical transcription training and schooling tips

Tag: medical transcriptionist schooling

How to Ensure Your Medical Transcription Schooling Is a Waste of Time and Money

So you’re in a rush to get through your medical transcription schooling and start working. That’s great. Wonderful in fact. That’s one of the best ways to ensure you waste your time and money on training that won’t actually get you work as a medical transcriptionist after graduation. But there’s still more you can do to make yourself as unemployable as possible as a medical transcriptionist.

1. Fail to research school quality.

You might hit it lucky and pick a great medical transcriptionist school, or you might pick one of the worst. Don’t do your research and let Fate take you where it may for your education. This way you can later complain that there’s no way to get into medical transcription and that it’s all really a scam.

2. Skim through your studies.

All a medical transcriptionist really does is type up what the doctor says, right? You don’t need to pick up all that terminology or learn about procedures and stuff. You can make it work by just listening to the dictation. No problem.

3. Only work your self paced course occasionally.

It’s one of the great things about self paced medical transcription education. You can do it on your own time. So if there’s a party or something you’d rather go to, head off. Then find other reasons to skip out on your studies the next night, and the next. Hey, there’s that great TV show you’ve been meaning to watch. School will be there later.

At least until you find out you’ve run out of time on the program you signed up with. Why can’t they give you a reasonable amount of time to finish the course? It’s not your fault you didn’t get it done, is it?

4. Don’t review assignments after you finish them.

The grades don’t really matter, or what you missed on the test. All that matters is that you’re one section closer to done. You can pick it up as you work. Employers don’t care about how well you did in your training, do they?

5. Choose the school with the least time spent on practice transcription.

You want to get moving fast, don’t you? You can build up your transcription skills more when you’re getting paid for it. All you need in your training is enough of it to learn the basics. It won’t matter that you’re earning less than others and really not being productive later because at least you’re getting paid to do the work.

While none of these will guarantee that you’ll never find success as a medical transcriptionist, they can make the path to your career much more challenging, and may well keep you out. Medical transcription is a highly demanding career, and employers expect a lot from their employees. Make sure you make a good choice in your training so that you get off to a good start with your career.

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

Which Online School Is Best for a Medical Transcriptionist Diploma?

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.

Do You Really Have to Attend a School to Become a Medical Transcriptionist?

You’ve heard about working as a medical transcriptionist, perhaps even at home, and you’re eager to get your career moving. You’re pretty confident about your typing skills and your ability to use them as a medical transcriptionist. Are you really going to have to spend a bunch of time in school to become a medical transcriptionist?

Probably, yes. Especially if you think a medical transcriptionist just types up what the doctor says. The job is just not as simple as that.

First and foremost, it’s hard to get into medical transcription without experience, never mind without training. It’s a career that demands near perfect accuracy. Going to school to become a medical transcriptionist will help you to build the skills and knowledge you will need to do the work.

Even nurses who want to go into this field are usually better off going to school first. It’s very different dealing with patients than it is transcribing doctor’s dictation. You can’t get by with almost knowing how to spell all the terminology. You must get it right.

Nurses and others with a medical background do have some advantages, as medical terminology, physiology, anatomy and pharmacology will be much more familiar. But a refresher won’t hurt, and if you choose a self paced online school you can work through the familiar parts more quickly. But nurses and other medical personnel will still need to learn how to transcribe, and that’s a skill that comes only with hours of practice.

Transcription itself can be extremely challenging. Doctors usually speak differently when they dictate. Many speak as fast as they can, to get the work out of their way. Others will eat or do other activities as they dictate. Then there are strong accents to deal with. The only thing that will help you to cope is a lot of practice. The best place to get this is through a medical transcriptionist school.

Learning to transcribe will be a huge help when you first become a medical transcriptionist. You’ll be faster at it than you would be if you’ve never transcribed before. If your job pays on production, you want every advantage you can get when it comes to speed and accuracy.

Unless you know someone who wants to hire you with no training and no experience, attending school will be a big help in getting that first job. Provided you attend a good one, of course. There are many schools that are not worth the time or expense to attend. There are others that are very much worth both time and expense for the quality of their training.

Going through a good medical transcription school and getting good grades on your work is one way you can show potential employers that you can do the work. Without some sort of proof that you’re a competent medical transcriptionist, most companies won’t give you or your resume a second look.

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

Is Schooling Necessary to Get a Job as a Medical Transcriptionist?

Going through medical transcriptionist schooling may seem like an extra, expensive step to getting a job as a medical transcriptionist. Why do you need to spend thousands of dollars and several months learning the skills for this job? Isn’t it just typing up what the doctor says? How can that take special schooling?

It does indeed take special schooling for most people. The skills needed to become a successful medical transcriptionist aren’t as simple as they sound.

You aren’t just typing up what the doctor says, for example. Many doctors don’t dictate all that clearly, which means even just typing up what they say isn’t a particularly easy thing. You also have to understand what they’re saying and make sure it makes sense. Doctors are human, and they misspeak at times. They can name the wrong body part, wrong medication, wrong disorder… or just so mangle the pronunciation that you don’t know right away what they really said. Your schooling helps you to learn how to deal with these situations.

There are a lot of formatting rules for medical transcriptionists to follow as well. That’s not something you can always tell from what the doctor dictates. You have to know what the correct format is for the type of report being dictated.

Taking the time to get your schooling can even impact how much you earn as you work. It’s not just a matter of starting pay rate, it’s that many medical transcriptionists are paid on production. The better you know your work, the faster you can transcribe, and the more you can earn.

There are very few openings for untrained people wanting to get into medical transcription. It’s even challenging to get started when you do have training if you don’t pick a trusted school. Most openings state that you need at least two years of experience. If you want to get past that requirement, you need a solid education to show that you can do the work.

It’s also impractical for employers to train most people to do the work. It takes at least four months to learn this job, and 6-9 months is not at all uncommon. That’s a long time for an employer to let an employee sit in a training room.

There’s also too much risk to letting someone with insufficient medical knowledge do this work. Medical records are very sensitive. They must be transcribed accurately. If you can’t trust an employee to get the work done right, you’re not going to want to hire that employee. Why should an employer consider you if you don’t have some way to show them that you can do the work?

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

Do You Need Schooling to Become an At Home Medical Transcriptionist?

You want to become an at home medical transcriptionist. You’re confident you can pick up the needed skills on your own if they’d just give you the chance. Do you really need to pay for medical transcriptionist schooling and take all that time to learn it at school in order to work at home in medical transcription?

Yes, probably you do.

There are a few reasons for this. First of all, it’s not as simple as just typing what the doctor says. People who don’t know better may describe it that way, but few things in life are as basic as their simplest description.

You have to learn formatting. You have to know medical terminology. You have to know anatomy and physiology. You have to know the names of many medications and their generic variations. You have to develop your ear for transcription, and that’s not an easy thing to do. It only comes with practice.

Most of all, you must be fast and accurate. Medical transcription companies don’t want to spend significant amounts of time training you to do the work. They want you ready to go with just a little help getting used to the particular system they use. They don’t want you overloading their QA staff with poor quality work because you don’t really understand what you’re doing and can’t quite hear the difference between very similar terms used by the doctors.

Even though medical transcription schooling costs money, in the long run you may earn more if you go through it. Most at home medical transcriptionists are paid per line, not per hour. This means that the faster you can transcribe accurately, the more you earn. Taking the time to go through schooling means that you’ll be a faster transcriptionist at the start, and capable of earning more money.

If you feel you have most of the skills needed already, consider that many online medical transcriptionist schools are self paced. If you already know the information, you can go through that part of the course more quickly, and spend more time on the parts you still need to learn. You may be surprised during your training to find out what you don’t know already that you need to know to work in this industry.

I’ll admit that it’s not completely impossible to become a medical transcriptionist without training, but the odds of doing so successfully are pretty low. That’s not the usual way to get started, and particularly in low supervision areas such as at home medical transcription employers need to know their employees can do the work with minimal help and supervision. Having an education gives them reassurance that you know what you’re doing, which increases the chance that they will consider you at all for a job.

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

What Kind of Medical Transcriptionist Schooling Do You Need to Get a Job?

You quickly learn that medical transcriptionist schooling is required when you want to become a medical transcriptionist at home. There’s just no way around it. Employers want experienced or they want people who have gone through high quality medical transcriptionist schooling on their own to get the work.

When you start looking at medical transcription schools, you quickly realize there are a lot of them, and they all promise to give you the training you need in order to land a great job. The only problem is figuring out which ones will give you training that is really worth your time and money.

It’s not as bad as it looks at first. You just need to know how to figure out which ones have a good reputation.

Checking for AHDI Approval is one easy way. AHDI checks medical transcriptionist schools to see if they’re offering the kind of schooling needed to learn medical transcription. They only give approval to the schools which meet their fairly strict criteria.

Don’t confuse this with AHDI membership. Any school or individual can become a member. AHDI Approval is an entirely different matter. They review the school, make sure it has a solid curriculum, that there’s an experienced medical transcriptionist involved in the process, and many other criteria must be met.

You can also check to see if the school is partnered with potential employers. Career Step, the school I recommend, is partnered with my own former employer. Many other employers hire their graduates as well. That’s a good sign when you’re looking at a school.

There’s one more big thing you need to look at when you’re considering medical transcriptionist schooling.

Yourself. How committed are you to getting a great education?

Some students just want it all handed to them. It doesn’t matter how good the training is, however, if you don’t do the work. You’re the one who has to learn the information presented to you. If you just skim through, do the minimum to pass the tests, you aren’t going to get hired after graduation. That kind of attitude just does not produce a transcriptionist who knows his or her work.

It won’t matter how good the school was or which employers usually are willing to test graduates. If you didn’t learn all the things your school tried to teach you about becoming a medical transcriptionist, you aren’t going to get hired.

Combine good quality medical transcriptionist schooling with the determination to learn the job thoroughly, and you’re more likely to work after graduation. There are plenty of employers who hire medical transcriptionists. You just have to show them you’re the one they need.

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