Medical Transcriptionists

A Day in the Life

As a medical transcriptionist, your job is to use the dictations provided by doctors and other health professionals to make comprehensive, easy-to-understand patient records. The transcriptions that you perform will appear in patients' files and help doctors, nurses and clinicians make informed medical decisions.

You can perform this job at home or at a medical clinic. If you work in a doctor's office or clinic, you'll arrive for work and sit down at your desk. You'll don headphones and begin listening to the dictations that your employer provides. Using a foot pedal or computer software to control the speed of the playback, you'll use these dictations to craft straightforward medical records. Throughout the course of your day, you'll produce records that include information about pre-existing medical conditions, diagnostic tests, outpatient procedures and long-term prognoses.

As the day goes on, you'll need to employ your knowledge of proper English grammar and syntax. You'll have to translate any strange jargon or shorthand that you encounter into plain English. You'll also have to re-translate unclear transcriptions made by faulty speech-recognition software and medical transcriptionists based in foreign countries.

At several points during the day, you may need to consult a professional medical text to clarify an unfamiliar medical condition or drug that you encounter. At times, you may even need to consult the doctor on duty to ask a specific question. You'll hang up your headphones and call it a day when the other staff members at the clinic leave the office.

If you work at home, you'll have the added advantage of being able to choose at least some of the hours that you work. As such, your day will begin when you choose. Since you'll work through a transcription service that connects you with medical professionals around the country, you'll receive a certain number of dictations per day and be expected to complete them before a specified deadline. To ensure that you get all of your work done, you may have to work a little later than you would at a doctor's office. You'll "punch out" for the day when you've completed all of your dictations.

On any given day, you could receive dictations from hospitals and clinics in places as far apart as California, Maine and North Dakota. When you've finished transcribing a dictation, you'll submit it to your medically-trained superiors. They'll review it for accuracy and may ask you to make changes or improvements.

Whether you work at home or in a doctor's office, you'll soon learn how to work quickly and accurately. At the end of the year, you may receive a performance bonus for exceeding your quotas or producing excellent work. In the end, you'll be able to take pride in the fact that your work ensures that vulnerable patients receive accurate, high-quality medical treatment.