If you want a long and successful career in medical transcription, it is important to identify the factors that can pull you back. More often than not, it is the stress caused by these factors that becomes detrimental to your career. If you are a home-based medical transcriptionist, you have to make an effort to keep stress at bay. Here are five major factors that can cause you stress.

• Irregular inflow of work: As a medical transcriptionist who is starting work from home, you’ll experience irregular inflow of work. This will mean that you won’t have regular income for months to come. Now, this can cause tremendous stress. You must understand that establishing your credibility and getting work on a regular basis will take some time.
• Unplanned work: If you work without a work plan in place, you will not only lose time but also your peace of mind. Moreover, your productivity will suffer. It is, therefore, important that you fix up your working hours and work up a routine.
• Distance from family and friends: Even though you are at home all the time, your work will keep you occupied, making you inaccessible to your family. Now, the only way you can spend time with family and friends is by sticking to a sensible routine.
• Difficult-to-decipher recordings: The most difficult part in transcription of any kind is making sense of the audio files. Incomprehensible audio recordings can cause a tremendous amount of stress, lingering for as long as the audio is not deciphered. If this happens consistently, you need to bring it up with the doctors who are recording the information.
• Absence of guidance: Most home-based professionals like the concept of working from home because they do not have to deal with a boss. However, there are times when one needs guidance. In medical transcription, bad audio recordings or limited knowledge in a domain can make you need guidance, causing stress.

Now that you have identified the stress-causing factors, you’ll be able to beat them wisely.

When you start your medical transcription career, you should know what the profession offers and what it expects. Looking only at the benefits of the profession will land you in trouble. Medical transcription requires a lot of mental preparation. You need to start right to have a smooth sail ahead.

It is important to start your work with a plan. It not only helps you manage time, be productive, but also gives you ample time for the non-working part of your life. Start by making a daily work routine and then see how you can spread your work over the working hours. A routine and a plan will keep your disciplined.

You have to keep in mind that you cannot allow distractions. Focus is the key to getting work done. Your commitment can go for a toss if there are distractions around. You have to be prepared to ignore the distractions and concentrate on your work.

It is important that you don’t get the deadlines get to you. As a medical transcriptionist, you will have to deal with stringent deadlines everyday; don’t let them alienate you from your personal life. A good personal life can help you rise in your professional life as well.

If you have chosen to work from home, be prepared to handle the highs and lows of income. Don’t overwhelm yourself by taking too much on your plate. Remember, if you deliver quality work, you will have good work coming in consistently. Don’t try to please too soon; you may end up exhausting yourself.

What says that you are a good medical transcriptionist? Your work. Yes, it is you who can establish that goodwill for you. But wouldn’t it be nice if someone concurred that you are good. The Association of Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) helps you establish your expertise by issuing certain credentials to you. Now, of course, you have to earn these credentials.

The Certified Medical Transcriptionist (CMT) is a popular credential offered by the AHDI. You need to pass a test to become a CMT. You need to possess two years of medical transcription experience in acute care for taking the CMT test.

Wondering what ‘acute care’ is? Here’s how AHDI defines it:

…hospital-based dictation comprised of a variety of dictators (including ESL), and multiple report types and specialties, primarily operative reports, consultations, discharge summaries, and history and physicals.

The CMT test lasts for five hours. You will know the results as soon as you complete the test. The test report will give you value-added feedback to help you understand your strengths and the areas the improvement. You have to pay a fee 275 USD to take the test. However, if you are a member of AHDI, you need to pay only 195 USD.

In case you don’t pass the test in the first attempt, you can take it again after six months. The credential is valid for three years. You are required to take another test for re-certification after three years.

If you don’t have relevant experience, you can take the Registered Medical Transcriptionist (RMT) test.

When you decide to work as a home-based medical transcriptionist, you need more than transcription skills. Why? Because while the home offers comfort and flexibility, it throws in a handful of distractions and other responsibilities too. Let me tell you what you need for being a good home-based transcriptionist.

You have got to balance your personal and professional life at home. At home, you may find yourself struggling to balance professional and personal commitments. You have to learn to strike a balance or you will end up spoiling your medical transcription career.

You have to avoid distractions. Children, domestic chores, uninformed guests, a favorite movie or a television show – the distractions at home can be plenty. You cannot afford to be distracted in a profession that expects high quality and fast turnarounds.

You have to let family and friends know your working routine. How will you handle your family’s additional expectations since you are at home all the time? You have to inform your family and friends of your working hours and tell them not to disturb you when you are working. You have to start consider your work routine sacred and stick to it.

You have to understand the uncertainty of income when working from home. As a home-based medical transcriptionist, you may have to deal with less income in the initial months. You have to keep yourself focused and motivated in order to survive in the profession.

Are you a home-based medical transcriptionist? How do you handle the work? Do share your experience with our readers.

The medical transcription profession is a demanding one. It expects you to meet extremely stringent deadlines and high quality goals. It also expects you to keep the medical data secure. The medical transcriptionist cannot be complacent or he/she risks ruining his/her career. Today, I’ll talk about four mistakes that you should not commit if you want to do well in the profession.

Taking random, unplanned breaks: When you have to take a break, take logical breaks, not random ones. Avoid getting up in the middle of a task. In fact, you should take logical breaks compulsorily.

Attending to domestic chores during the planned working hours: You cannot let domestic worries trouble you when you are working. Attend to them only once your work is done. You have to learn to treat your home-office as an actual office from where you cannot attend to your household responsibilities.

Watching TV during your working hours: TV and medical transcription don’t go together. You cannot let other sounds distract you while you are transcribing. Don’t watch the TV even during your breaks as you run the risk of prolonging your breaks and lose focus.

Social networking while working: When working, close all e-mail clients and networking websites. I agree you need a minute’s break from time to time, but you cannot be online the whole time you are working. You can chose to access the social networking sites for a few minutes as a reward after you have completed a certain number of tasks.

These mistakes can cost you dearly. It is important you make an effort to keep yourself focused and motivated.

When you start your own home-based medical transcription business, you need determination and dedication. Apart from mental preparations, here are some other things you need:

• The right office space: The office space is the most important and the first thing you should pay attention to when you contemplate working from home. Your home-office should be set up in a secluded space not frequented by other members of your family. Also, it should be noise-free so that you can focus on your work.
• A dedicated phone: You should not use your home phone for official purposes. While making calls is alright, receiving calls on your home phone may present a clumsy image as you may have different people in your family, including kids, taking your calls. So, you need a phone dedicated to your business.
• Work computer: Your computer should be completely dedicated to your work. If the same computer is used for personal work or by other members of the family, you are at the risk of losing work. Moreover, you will not be able to comply with the guidelines of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
• Secure FTP connection: In order to be compliant with HIPAA, you need a secure FTP connection. You need the secure connection to transfer medical transcription files smoothly.
• Transcription aids: Working on your own requires you to keep aids handy. You should always have a medical abbreviation expander, a medical spell-checker, and the Association of Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) medical transcription style guide with you while working. You will also need the anti-virus and firewall software. And you have to make sure you keep updating them.

Flexibility, good money, easy entry, and choice of working from home – what is there to not like in medical transcription? Well, plenty. If you have been looking just at the pros of the profession, you may be in for a surprise once you become a medical transcriptionist. Today’s post brings to you four reasons that you may despise (yes, that’s strong!) the profession.

• You have to work independently. Do you look at it as a perk? Well, you realize its intensity when you start working. Incomprehensible recordings, doctors who are difficult to deal with, and strict reviewers can cause a lot of trouble, more because the transcriptionist has to deal with all this alone.
• The deadlines in the profession are really stringent. Oh, you already know that! But do you know that most of the work has a 24-hour turnaround time. There are some tasks that need to be delivered in as little as four hours! As a medical transcriptionist, you will have to be on your toes almost all the time.
• The profession has zero tolerance when it comes to critical errors in the medical records. A critical error can impact the safety of a patient. Keeping this in mind, the transcriptionist can never be casual with his/her work.
• You have got to keep learning beyond the training and throughout your career. The medical transcriptionist is required to enhance his/her medical knowledge on a daily basis. Given the kind of deadlines they work with, not everyone can cope with challenge of learning everyday.

Now, this post was not meant to scare you. It was just meant to make you aware of every aspect of the profession.

If you are a medical transcriptionist who takes pride in delivering quality work, you should definitely be proud of that. But is your quality compromising on the deadlines? Quality loses its meaning if your medical records are not delivered in time. High productivity and high quality need to go hand-in-hand in the medical transcriptionist’s life.

Discipline is the key to timely delivery of records. In today’s post, we bring to you three practical tips that will help you improve your productivity.

Start using shortcuts. The computer and the word processor offer several shortcuts for you to play with. You may not realize this but using shortcuts help make your work complete faster than when you are not using them. Remember, every minute is valuable when you are chasing the stringent deadline.

Make use of the abbreviation-expander. You will save a few seconds for each medical abbreviation, thus saving you a considerable amount of time at the end of day. Moreover, the application saves you from losing focus every time you come across an abbreviation. Without the expander, you would have to search for the expansion of acronyms, spoiling the flow of your work.

Customize the word processor. Microsoft Word has a feature called Autocorrect which corrects/expands an input automatically when it is typed with a slight change of spelling or when its short form is typed. This helps you type faster. If you don’t use MS Word, you may find a similar feature in your word processor and if you don’t, create some macros.

If you have any other such practical tip, do share it with us.

Your choice of a medical transcription course will determine whether your entry into the industry will be smooth or not? Answer the following questions to find out if you are choosing the course the right way.

• Do you make sure the medical transcription course conforms to COMPRO? The curriculum of a good medical transcription course will conform to the COMPRO (competency profile for medical transcription education) guidelines as stated by the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI).
• Do you find out how many hours of dictation are included in the course? The higher the number of hours, the more prepared you will be for the job. Make sure that the dictations are authentic. Many courses have dictations recorded by actors; these won’t help you a bit.
• Do you make sure if the course is followed by some kind of job assistance? A good institute will have industry connections to help your entry into it easy. Also, go through the placement figures of earlier batches to understand the effectiveness of an institute’s placement assistance.
• Do you compare different courses? Don’t go for the first one you come across even if you like it.
• Do you find out what others are saying about the course? Go through online reviews and feedbacks on different medical transcription courses. This should give you a fair idea of what the course is like.
• Do you talk to the alumni of medical transcription training institutes? Get in touch with the former students of training institutes and ask them about the courses. They will give you genuine feedback on them

If your answer to all the above-mentioned questions have been ‘yes’, you will definitely choose a good course.

When you work from home, you don’t see the competition around. And you don’t even have a boss hovering around you. And then you get to work as per your convenience. You find yourself in control. Do you find these things as benefits of home-based medical transcription? Well, you’ll be surprised to know how these very things ruin your productivity. And if you cannot maintain your productivity, you won’t last too long as a home-based medical transcriptionist. So, what can you do? Here are some tips.

• Don’t take unnecessary work. Know when to say ‘no’. You should know when your plate is full. Don’t take more work for more income or to impress your client.
• Make an effort to avoid distractions. Don’t log on to social networking sites during your work hours. Don’t check your personal mails.
• Plan your day and stick to the plan. Make a realistic plan, accommodating your meals, breaks etc.
• Work only during your designated working hours. Try not to extend your work beyond that. Also, make it a point not to do anything else during those hours.
• Take logical breaks during work. Making an effort in doing so will prevent the random breaks you take all the time.
• Try not to watch the television during your breaks. The breaks can get prolonged if your attention is elsewhere. Even during your meal breaks, don’t let the TV distract you.

It is you who knows what helps you work sincerely and what causes the problems. Make a conscious effort to prevent the problems.