The ads tout medical transcription as a glamorous job. “Stay at home!” they proclaim. “Be your own boss!” And the one that really makes me laugh: “Earn big money!”
In theory it seems great. After all, when you work at home you don’t have any transportation expenses, you don’t have to dress up (or dress at all if you don’t want), and you aren’t spending your money on Starbuck’s or fast food. You get to learn a lot about illnesses and the drugs and procedures to treat them, and by golly, you learn to spell them correctly.
But that’s where the honeymoon ends. Let’s face it. You’re chained to a computer, and when your fingers aren’t moving you aren’t making any money. When the doctor mispronounces a drug name so badly that you can’t sound it out phonetically, he won’t hear your discontented grumbling as you desperately leaf through your medical books. In the same vein, when the practitioner is totally disorganized and wastes precious time trying to gather her thoughts, she won’t know how frustrated you are, or hear you screaming at the computer after she tells you to delete the paragraph you just typed, then waits 30 seconds before starting over. Life is reduced to this. Spaces and letters constitute pennies to the dollar. Some doctors can cost you significant income due to their dawdling.
But that’s not all. As an “independent contractor” you get paid for work performed. That’s it. They take no deductions so you have to pay your taxes. You have to get your own health insurance. You have to buy your own equipment.
I work for a large transcription service that contracts with health care professionals to deliver transcription with a 24-hour turnaround. I type strictly psychiatric dictation, so the pool of practitioners is relatively small. I type for three clinics in three parts of the country, and I never know which cluster of docs will appear in my queue. I may have a dozen dictations from one doctor for a day or two or three, then not see their voice files for a month.
Even though the people are familiar–if you can say a disembodied voice with whom you can never interact is familiar–there is no give and take. Your work is done in isolation and there is no conversation. The doctors never know who you are. Moreover, you never hear from your company unless you make a mistake.
This can get pretty depressing. You begin to feel like a non-entity. There is no one to have a conversation with at the water cooler. Heck, even office gossip looks good compared to this silence. You are fully aware that you are a piece of production equipment, and if you drop out of the picture there are hundreds of drones out there to pick up the slack. (As a matter of fact, the voice files that are not covered by U.S. transcribers are picked up in India after hours. ) Your contribution is totally insignificant.
Glamor job? In your dreams.
