A Day in the Life of a Medical Transcriptionist (home-based position)
Medical transcription is a fast-paced, specialized healthcare field with our own language,
rules and regulations. More appropriately, today we are known as a Medical Language
Specialist (MLS) with responsibilities to preserve the accuracy and integrity of legal
medical documents. No two days are the same on the job, and the learning never ends.
Although we sometimes face challenges; they are resolvable, and there is always an
abundant workload. Moreover, the ability to work from home makes this position highly
desirable provided one is disciplined and focused.
At the medical center where I work, dictation can be done from either inside or outside
the hospital for all physicians with staff privileges by dialing into the dictation system to
a designated number. All dictation is recorded through a digital system and is managed
through an application called DVI that is now supported by Word Systems, Inc. At our
institution, dictation and transcription are separated into two separate categories;
radiology and medical. An on-staff dials into the DVI phone line and keys in the
pertinent information for the dictation. The dictations are set up in work types designated
for the specific report that they wish to dictate; i.e., history and physical, consultation,
operating report, discharge summary, cardiology procedure, radiology, etc. Once the
dictation is recorded on the DVI system, it is immediately off-loaded to our transcription
program.
The transcription platform used is an Internet-based system called TA Client and is a
program that was created and supported by Arrendale Associates out of North Carolina.
Within the TA application, the “jobs,” (each dictated report) are housed in an area called
job administration. This area holds all dictation that is waiting to be transcribed. Each
document is assigned a work type and is weighted according to priority. Each
transcriptionist has the capability to view job administration, which allows them to
manipulate documents (should the need arise) for problematic dictations, to move them to
a higher or lower priority, change the work type as necessary when there is an error, to
work through a specific backlog or dictator, as well as to route preoperative reports to a
designated area until the patient is assigned a current account number if the report is
being dictated preoperatively so it is not kicked around by multiple associates until they
are assigned an appropriate number.
The transcription system is set up such that when a transcriptionist signs in to the
program, the jobs auto-route to available transcriptionists two jobs at a time. As they
complete one job and submit it, the queue will refresh and load another job. Each time a
transcriptionist call up a report to do, she is prompted by a demographic screen that
populates the patient demographic information that the dictator has keyed in (on a good
day), providing there are demographics available. Sometimes, little to no information is
given wherefore the MLS detective skills come into play. Again, the patient’s medical
record is a number that stays the same no matter how many times they come to the
medical center. The different stays are called encounters, and those numbers change each
time they visit. These are called account numbers.