The world needs medical transcriptionists and it will continue to do so as long as it needs meaningful and relevant medical records. And medical records do not seem to go out of fashion what with the healthcare and the insurance industries thriving on them. Imagine, for a second, a world without medical records! How would a doctor know your medical history, your allergies if he/she were to treat you for a health condition? How would you claim your health insurance without any documents?

The world would definitely be weird if it were not for the organized healthcare documentation. And who creates these documents? Your friendly neighborhood medical transcriptionist! The transcriptionist is much more important in the current scheme of things that you give him/her credit for. The US Department of Labor predicts that the employment of medical transcriptionists will increase 14 percent from 2006 to 2016. This rate of growth is considered faster than the average of other occupations. And why not? With the ever-increasing population the world over and the life of the average person increasing, we have way too many medical records to create and maintain. The opportunities in the medical transcription field will keep increasing with the increasing population.

If you think that doctors who originally record medical information and technological aids will replace the transcriptionist in the future, let’s tell you why that won’t happen. The truth is doctors are not equipped to handle documentation. Moreover, they don’t have the time to create perfect medical records. And the speech-recognition software that came into the market and promised to help the doctors could not deliver. First of all, doctors need to spend a considerable amount of time with the software and they definitely do not have the time for that. Second, the software does not deliver accurate results, requiring the intervention of a human being (the transcriptionist!) to make sense of what it transcribes.

The medical transcriptionist has become integral to the smooth functioning of the healthcare as well as the insurance industries. And as long as humanity needs medical attention, the medical transcriptionist will remain in demand.