What does a Medical Transcriptionist do?
Medical transcriptionists (MTs) are specialists in medical language and healthcare documentation who interpret and transcribe dictation by physicians and other healthcare professionals regarding patient assessment, workup, therapeutic procedures, clinical course, diagnosis, prognosis, etc., editing dictated material for grammar and clarity as necessary and appropriate. The process of medical transcription may involve editing machine-translated text. This requires listening to dictation while reading a draft created through speech recognition technology and editing the text on screen. This editing may range from minimal to extensive, depending on the capabilities of the speech recognition software and the dictating habits of the originator, and may include correction of content as well as punctuation, grammar, and style. Q. What characteristics do I need to become a medical transcriptionist? You need excellent English language skills as well as a strong interest in the medical language.
Let’s use a taped dictation as an example. Very simply, the medical transcriptionist takes the tape and inserts it into his/her transcriber. (A transcriber is a tape recorder that can be operated with a foot pedal instead of using the fingers. It’s made especially for transcriptionists.) The transcriptionist puts on headphones attached to the transcriber and pushes the pedal with her foot. As the tape begins to play, she hears the doctor’s dictation. Because she’s trained in the art of medical transcribing, she quickly transfers information to the appropriate places in the computer, making sure all information is correct. Medical transcribing is more complex than data entry and goes beyond copying data from paper into a computer. A transcriptionist hears full sentences and thought processes about a patient, which makes the job much more interesting than data entry. Many transcriptionists work from home offices rather than commuting to a clinic or acute-care facility on a daily basis. T
A medical transcriptionist is a skilled typist, excellent at interpreting what they read or hear, and a good grammarian. They also have to have strong familiarity with medical language and terms. Further, medical transcriptionists must be able to take what they hear and edit it, transform it, or make it logical without changing relevant details or medical information. Medical transcriptionists may work for doctors’ offices, insurance companies, individual doctors, or for hospitals. Their primary job is to transcribe dictated material into clear and understandable text, generally for the purpose of charting information on patients. In order to do this, the medical transcriptionist must be able to interpret what he or she hears or reads, since not all doctors or medical workers create clear transcriptions. It’s not uncommon for medical workers to have conversations in the midst of a transcription, give directions to ignore parts of a transcription, or to leave out some relevant details t
Medical transcription is like nothing else you’ll ever experience. Doctors see patients in hospitals, clinics and physicians’ offices and dictate important information about the patient’s history, physical examination, diseases, procedures, laboratory tests and diagnoses. They talk in technical terms and often so quickly that you must know approximately what they are supposed to say or you won’t be able to understand it when you hear it! New students often think that the “dictation” doctors do is like some executive dictating a letter to a secretary, in which he/she specifies every line break, every paragraph, every punctuation mark, and most of the spelling. This is absolutely NOT how doctors dictate. They expect the medical transcriptionist to do the formatting, the spelling, and to convert that dictated material from the doctor’s shorthand medical slang to formal medical language. Doctors often say things in their dictation that they never intend to be transcribed. They say, “Oh, no
Medical transcriptionists (MTs) are specialists in medical language and healthcare documentation. They interpret and transcribe dictation by physicians and other healthcare professionals regarding patient assessment, workup, therapeutic procedures, clinical course, diagnosis, prognosis, etc., editing dictated material for grammar and clarity as necessary and appropriate. The process of medical transcription may involve editing text that has been produced by speech recognition. This requires listening to dictation while reading a draft created via speech recognition technology and editing the text on a computer screen. This editing may range from minimal to extensive, depending on the capabilities of the speech recognition software and the dictating habits of the originator, and may include correction of content as well as punctuation, grammar, and style.
