Tools You Will Need to be Successful

While you are going to school you should start slowly preparing your home office.  Your research tools should come first, as you will also use these during school and throughout your career.  

The first thing you need to buy is a medical spell checker.  Most of us work in MS Word formats but there are spell checkers compatible with other word processors too.  I always, ALWAYS buy Stedman's products, their spell checkers and word books have never let me down.  I have never spent more than one month in QA and now that I have this much experience if I pick up an extra contract I am usually out of QA in two days!  I attribute this to my Stedman's library at home.  

The next most important tool to buy is a pharmaceutical word book that is up to date on today's new drugs.  I again use Stedman's Quick Look Electronic Drug Reference, my version is 2011.  I buy a new one every other year.  If it is a totally new drug I will Google search it or go to http://www.rxlist.com/script/main/hp.asp .  If the doctor dictates the word and you cannot understand it clearly you can go to this phonetic drug look up site here:  http://www.drugs.com/search-wildcard-phonetic.html.  

I also buy Stedman's Word Books on CD-Rom.  The CD version is awesome because you never have to take your hands off your keyboard to look up a word.  So say for instance you need to look up a word that your orthopedic doctor said that sounded like sharko foot.  You would open your Stedman's Orthopedic and Rehab Words book and look up the word foot.  Go down the list and you will find Charcot foot and there you go you have the correct word and it took less than a minute.  Remember time is money in this job!  So find the Stedman's Word Book on CD that applies to the speciality that you are typing.   You can find Stedman’s word books and books on CD at www.stedmans.com .  By all means don’t buy every book as you will never use them all; it will depend on where you end up working which books you will need. 

Since you are just starting out you will also need to buy Stedman’s Pathology & Lab Medicine Words.  You will be typing a lot of lab tests and until you know the names you will need to look them up.  No guessing ever, remember if you are not 100% sure of a word dictated then you need to look it up and find the correct one or blank it for QA.  The Pathology & Lab Words book will be used constantly in your early years.  Remember a blank is never a mistake, but a guessed word can kill someone!

The dictionary you choose makes a huge difference too.  I always have a Dorland's Medical Dictionary on hand.  It is the #1 dictionary, but lately I have been looking for an electronic version to use instead.  Dorland’s only gives you access to their site for one year with a purchase of their dictionary and after this they charge you, but having a copy on hand is important as you can never go wrong with Dorland's.  Other online dictionaries I use are really only one and it is http://www.onelook.com/.  This is a dictionary and search engine for other dictionaries.  So every single place that word comes up on in the internet will be listed here too.  So far I haven’t found an electronic one I like as much as Dorland’s so I will probably bite the bullet and buy the subscription eventually.

Then finally, but certainly not least, is a text expander software.  I think the text expander that I upgraded to actually increased my income by $100 a week!  It's called Instatext and believe me you cannot be successful without this type of software.  I have tried cheaper ones where you have to remember all your shortcuts you added and they don't handle repeat similar short cuts well.  Whereas Instatext has a window open at the bottom, or top or where ever you want it to be, which presents a list of all the words that apply to the short cut you typed.   For instance I want to expand the word cholecystectomy, I would type the first letter then the first three letters of the dominant syllable like this ccys and it would expand the whole word cholecystectomy.  You can you MS Word’s auto correct function too, but personally I use it for words I constantly transpose such as hte for the and save the big phrases for my text expander.  You can find Instatext here http://www.fitaly.com/. 

In future blog posts I will post office equipment you will need with links to my favorite vendors.  I will also post a list of job search sites that I have used over the years for hospitals and online jobs.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Cheryl Newbanks

Getting Started In Medical Transcription

I get a lot of people asking me how they can get started in medical transcription.   There are plenty of online schools, some better than others, but they don't seem to help you get started much after you graduate.   In today's industry I think it is most important to find a school that will offer you an internship or externship.  I did an unpaid externship but it also got me my first hospital job.  The catch 22 in medical transcribing is you need experience to get a job and when coming fresh out of school you obviously have no experience.  I went through my community college, but if you can find an online school that offers intern/externships then choose the one that does. 

Next, look for a school that will teach you the medical language including prefixes, suffixes, and anatomy.   But that is a small part of the job; you also need to understand about the medical record system.  What types of records you will be typing.  Being a rookie you will start typing discharge summaries, so it would be nice to know what they are!  After that they may move you to consultations and history and physicals.  You will need to know what those records entail and the purpose of them.  

The school you choose should have an English 101 course as part your certificate.  Every record we type is a legal record and needs to have the proper formatting, punctuation, and style.  Having a good grasp on the proper grammar will get you out of QA faster.  A transcriptionist who doesn't need to have everything they type sent to QA is a valued in-disposable employee.  

Your school will be a good one if it teaches you the tools of the trade.  It should show you what types of expanders to choose from and how to set them up, what research tools you should use, dictionaries, websites, equipment sites, etc.  Research tools will be especially important, because as a newby you will be researching words half the day.  The tools you use in your home office will determine if you are just a good transcriptionist versus a great one who gets released from QA and a pay increase!  They will also determine how fast you can find info and get back to typing or waste time and money ( because in this biz time is money) looking for info.

Next, obviously you need to be a pretty decent typist., but not in the traditional sense of the word.  I figure about 65% of the words I type are typed in shorthand using expanders (I will blog on this at a later date).  So you don't need to be a super fast typist but instead a smart typist.   

The school you choose should also have a medical ethics course.  You will need some HIPPA training so you know what is allowed and what is not allowed.  Also you should have training in the Medical Transcriptionist Book of Style, which is the gold standard on proper terminology and medical writing.  

As this blog grows hopefully I can show you how to be a great transcriptionist with job security and not just a good one!