Medical transcription-Good job for an AS person?

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In one of the local newspapers there's an ad for a company that trains people for medical transcription jobs. The course can be taken at home (thank god), and often employers of medical transcriptionists let them work from home. The course itself lasts one year and I as yet have no idea how much it costs.

This sounds great, except I have a few issues with it. One being, my AS causes me to mishear words or misunderstand which word is said, since a transcriptionist listens to a doctor's taped dictations and then types it out. I do not know how badly this will affect my performance. If I get stuck on a word I will be very frustrated.

Another problem, but not related to AS, is my pain. While transcriptionists that work from home can go at their own pace, my fingers get VERY sore through long periods of prolonged typing. This is due to Lyme disease. The fingers already hurt; excessive typing makes it very much worse. I at least want to kick the Lyme disease before I even consider this.

Heh, my fingers are aching even more just typing this post.

Medical Transcriptionists do ALOT of typing so, if you have pain in your fingers when typing for long periods of time, this in not a good job for you. That is what Medical Transcriptionists do...they type all day long...most jobs require an eight hour day of typing. Even if you work parttime, just 2 or three days a week, the job requires you to type all day long (the usual, eight hours of shift work)...of course, you get your 10-15 minutes of a break during that eight hour shift.

Otherwise, if typing for a long duration does not bother you, Medical Transcriptionist can be an excellent job. Many Medical Transcriptionists now work from home due to the computer age and your employer won't even care if you are working in your
pajamas all day.

Medical Transcriptionist jobs just require you to have a good typing speed, a knowledge of medical terminology, and the ability to type for long periods. Also, although employers now allow you to work from home, they do keep track of your typing performance...and expect you to "turn out" a high number of typed reports.

As long as typing hurts you, this is not a good direction. Why not do some practice typing as you cure yourself physically and see how it goes?

I do legal transcribing from home. At first I made shocking hearing mistakes. You really do need to practise a lot. One thing I find very useful (since I use MSoft Word) is to mark anything that sounds unclear or strange or off or uncertain with a comment and a time marker. Then I can go back and check those with a fresh ear. (This is with digital audio. With tapes, not go easy.) When I started, we called this "tape checking" which means going back and relistening. As a beginner, you should tape check the entire document at first while learning.

You don't need a course to try this out. You can practice on other types of recordings. I hear there are things like that on Mechanical Turk, so you'd even get a few cents for typing them. What the heck, eh? Just for an experiment. This is not a good way to get money unless you live in a third world country, but it could be a way of getting some practice with real (and crappy) audio recordings.

Good things about transcribing are I am in control of my time and workspace. Freedom from dressing up and playing nice at an office. It's not *that* well paid when the audio is bad, as you get paid per line (medical) or page (legal) and when the audio sucks, the time is wasted, IMO. Also, you have to be able to plan your work so as to get stuff done on time. I think some aspies have problems in the area of planning and deadlines.

Hope this helps.

Found out the course costs 5200 but the Disability will pay it.

However I have a serious cramp in my right index finger...so I'll be holding off for a bit on this.

I do transcription, and what the others say is true - if you can't type because of pain, its not something you want to do for 8 hours at a time. If you work from home, you have to be very committed too - I had to let go an off site transcriptionist earlier this year because that individual just couldn't understand that we needed to see one days worth of typing per day every day - we had to chase the individual by phone and when she brought in the work a week later, she brought in the equivalent of 3 days typing - in the meantime, there was over a week's backlog of work. I couldn't pick up the extra typing for very long because I type 8 hours a day, 5 days a week already, and the extra would have meant weekends and no rest, and I do need a rest after 40 hours of clicking away. It turns out she was doing transcription as a hobby, something to do in the hours between her daughter leaving for school, and coming back.

If you work in an office or hospital, you have to be prepared for noise and distraction. I had a kid actually throw a temper tantrum *beside* my desk yesterday, but usually I find nurses and staff wander over behind me and carry on a conversation about - who knows, I am never interested. I invested in NC earphones to block out some of the mindless chatter.

Some people cannot handle 8 hours of straight typing. I have seen people do 4 or less and then proclaim they could do no more because it was "too monotonous". I personally never get bored, but I could see how a more social type could feel isolated . People often have no problems telling me that I am hard done by, too - which makes me upset because if I didn't like it - I wouldn't be doing it. i.e. you have to put up with unsolicited opinions.

You become very in tune with the human voice and start actively listening instead of just hearing noise. I find I can listen past heavy accents and speech impediments very easily, when others struggle. The internet and my nice big medical terminology dictionary are constant companions, and people's voices who you are familiar with, you find very rarely deviate from their speech patterns so even if they mumble, you know what they said - this comes from practice, however.

You also need a decent amount of speed. I actually type close to 200 wpm, but that is overkill - 50-60 is generally the standard. Some places have you do quotas though - hospitals, for example - so if you don't do a certain amount in a day you could be fired.

It is an interesting job though.

I'm hearing from my mom that there's employers that hire people to work from home where the person can decide how much typing they're going to do in one day.

what constitutes 'one day's worth' of typing? How long are these audio docs reports that need transcribing and stuff?

An employer will hire for their needs, so a days worth depends on them (although when you do freelance, you can call your price and the better your reputation, the better the price - however, remember, its a business and should be treated as such.). There is an expectation that their typing backlog won't be too large as you work through it - if you are only typing 4 hours a day and they need an 8 hour a day typist, soon things will be backed up to the point where patient health could be affected, because information isn't moving fast enough (say if someone needed a referral to a cancer specialist, etc on an urgent basis - if you haven't gotten to it yet, that patient has to wait - when you are sick and scared, waiting for the next step can seem like an eternity, and the doctors don't want to add to the stress already in place).

I am going to have to royally insult your mother, if I may she has no idea what kind of volume can come out of some offices, so it isn't the case that the office is at the mercy of the typist. I type 40 hours a week, so 8 hours a day, and I keep about a week behind with that effort - I have doctors that aren't adverse to putting out 6 page consults (this is a specialist so it can be very detailed), but other doctors may not be as verbose.

If you are working at home, you will also need to invest in equipment, btw. Remember that as well. Magnetic tapes are being phased out. Its all about digital now - but... some doctors are clinging to tapes until they disappear completely (much to my own distress, I like the digital best).

If your mom is talking about some of the newspaper ads - STEER CLEAR of those. Most - if not all - of those are scams. They sound great, but there is always a catch to them, and the catch is you end up working for slave wages while they make most of the money. Some of those ads will set a quota, which will "magically" change after you submit work, and you are liable to do a lot of work and not get paid at all.

Sorry if I sound overly dramatic, but I take this seriously,

Oh don't worry. People already wait MONTHS to see a cancer specialist, so it's not like any backlog from me would be responsible. Canadian Health Care FTL.


Go ahead. She loves to get small bits of information from people she knows and still knows very little on various subject matters. I would agree that 9 times out of 10 even when she has a 'friend' that she knows that does whatever (like medical transcription), she doesn't know what she's talking about.


This outfit doesn't use tapes. The course itself provides you with stuff on line plus a foot pedal that can be used to work the audio playback.


The course was newspaper ad, not employment. And in which case, Disability WILL pay for it. The site itself is canscribe.com


Well that's good.