This blog is part of a series on transcription. If you haven’t read the other blogs in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all transcription blogs.
Are medical transcriptionists going the way of the dinosaurs? The short answer is most definitely not. The long answer is, well, longer. 😛
Several years ago, I learned about medical transcription, and thought, “Well, that’s a pretty easy job–all you have to do is type what the doctor says.” After studying to become an MT for 18 months at Career Step, I have to say: It’s not that easy. There are a multitude of words that sound alike but are spelled completely different and of course have very different meanings. And when you factor in the fact that the reports you are transcribing are legal documents that can be used in court, it becomes pretty scary to “just type what you hear,” not to mention you are completely unemployable if you do that.
Then I began hearing about how all of our jobs as transcriptionists were going to be done away with, because voice recognition (VR) technology was the big boy coming into town, and there wasn’t going to be a need for transcriptionists any longer.
To that argument, I say: Watch this video. It was produced only a few short months ago, and it is “showing off” Vista’s ability to work with VR technology. I know a couple of transcriptionists who can’t type quickly for whatever reason (multiple sclerosis, etc) and so they use VR technology to type reports. All of them have said the same thing: It takes a long time to get the program up to speed because they have to train it for their voice, and it is more difficult and a lot slower to “type” this way than it is for you and I to type.
Like I already said, doctors are the highest paid staff at a hospital. It makes little sense for them to be the ones struggling with a VR program, trying to make it understand what they just said. So doctors rarely (read: almost never) use VR technology like the gentleman in the video above did. VR is still alive and well though–hospitals have realized that having the doctor use the VR technology directly made no sense and they have now gone to having the doctor dictate just like he normally does, and then running the dictation through a program afterwards, that “types” what it thinks the doctor said. The transcriptionist then gets the typed transcript and the audio recording, and has to go through and fix any mistakes or problems in the transcript. Depending on how difficult the doctor is (accent, rate of dictation speed, speech impediments, etc) this may be fairly easy, or the program may just deliver gooblygook that the transcriptionist basically has to delete and then start all over again. These sorts of changes in the technology part of transcription make it scary for a newbie to come along and look at, but I believe that transcription in one form or another will be around for a long time to come.
What about general and legal transcriptionists? Read on!