Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Work At Home In Medical Transcription

Among the many opportunities available today to work at home is the field of medical transcription. However, many people are unfamiliar with what medical transcription entails.

Medical transcription is a highly specialized job whether it’s done at home or not. As such, anyone who wishing to earn a medical transcription job will need certain kinds of skills and training. It is a legitimate career, not a get-rich-quick scheme. The ads that advertise a medical transcription job, working from home, and claiming the job requires virtually no skills, no experience, with instant cash returns are not truthful ads. Most likely they're scams aiming to separate honest people from their money.

The Job

Medical transcription is a real job with real responsibilities requiring the use of real skills. It is not unskilled labor like stuffing envelopes or assembling items. The work at home job of someone in medical transcription is that of a medical language specialist. This means that part of the responsibility as a medical transcription employee is to interpret and transcribe dictation by medical professionals.

As a medical transcription employee, the most common task will likely be handling dictation. These dictations can cover pretty much everything that takes place between the health care provider and the patient. All the information needed is usually recorded either into an audio tape or onto digital voice processing systems. The job therefore is to transfer this information into written form using a word processor.

Medical transcription can certainly pay well. However, it doesn’t come without work. As stated earlier in this article, working at home in medical transcription is no simple matter. It is not something that can be learned in four or six weeks. There are, fortunately for those interested, several training programs out there that specialize in medical transcription.

The Skills

When deciding to take a home medical transcription job, there is a general set of skills that will be needed. First, there is keyboarding skill. Since medical transcription deals mostly with typing, data entry skills will be necessary. Grammar and spelling skills are also important; since medical transcription focuses more upon getting the dictation transferred into an accessible written form. Mistakes in either spelling or grammar challenge accessibility. High retention will also be important as the primary job in medical transcription is recording information.

In most cases,medical transcription companies like to hire people with previous in-house experience for their medical transcription jobs working from home. This means that before they will hire someone to work at home they want to be assured that person has worked in medical transcription in a hospital or clinic. In fact, many of these companies require at least a year or two of experience working for the medical community from their applicants.

In order to assure getting a home medical transcription job, first obtaining the necessary experience is therefore advisable. If there are concerns about not getting the job because of a lack of experience a possible solution would be to do volunteer work. Many organizations are frequently looking for volunteers in medical transcription, allowing someone starting out to gain valuable experience towards landing a good job.

Unfortunately for most of us, the work from home option is just not a real option. I mean we have bills to pay, and a lifestyle to support and our boss is, well, let's not get too personal here, but our boss is simply not interested in letting us live the work from home lifestyle.

It adds so much flexibility and peace of mind that you wonder why you didn't make the sacrifice to get it done years before. You immediately escape the daily commute (both ways) and the perfunctory appearances and the mandatory glad handing. To work at home is as real as it gets to enjoy being somewhere we really don't want to be is hard on our emotional psyche and our self esteem. We are not being true to ourselves or our dreams.

A work from home career that you could feel good about while making a good living. It had to be a work from home job that was in demand and that required specialized training that could be acquired part time and at our own pace and that would preclude just any warm body off the streets from entering into the business and competing with us and watering down our wages.

The fact that almost 100% of medical transcriptionists work from home had a huge appeal. The fact that medical transcription is an extremely high growth career in the healthcare profession was even better. This meant job security. And the fact that it only required 9-12 months of specialized part-time training to get started sold us.


Sphere: Related Content

No comments: