How I got started in medical transcription

It all started after the birth of my son.  The first day I had to drop him off at a daycare and go to an office for 8 hours was the hardest day of my life — even harder than when he started kindergarten.  I cried all day, and I’m not one to shed tears indiscriminately. 

I had seen the TV ads and gotten plenty of those little fliers in the mail about working from home doing medical transcription and medical billing, etc., and making $35K or more per year.  Well, I found out real quick that the medical billing thing is a scam… unless you’ve done it for a reputable company to start with… so if ever you are tempted, bypass this one. 

I decided to sign up for a correspondence course, mostly based on the cost… which is actually a bad thing to do, but more on that later.  I started the correspondence course, got about half-way through, then we moved.  I let the ball drop on medical transcription and started working in a manufacturing plant on second shift, making good money and only having to have a part-time daycare, but it was a strain on my marriage.  After a frustrating 15 months, I quit that job and decided to finally finish something I had started.  I completed the correspondence course (a 6-month course if you did it correctly, unlike me), and set out to find a job in my newly chosen career….

But nobody told me how hard that would be….

Or how long it would actually take me to start working from home, the whole reason I started this career in the first place. 

The correspondence school I went through did not, at least at that time, offer any sort of help with finding a job doing what you’ve just paid them to train for.   Every job I looked at wanted experience, at least 2 to 5 years… but to get experience, I needed to work… but to work, I needed experience.  The catch-22 of every newbie.  So, out of desperation, I went to a temporary service that specialized in medical office personnel. 

My first job in a medical office was in a multidisciplinary clinic (that means more than one specialty) in the medical records department… just doing the filing.  I could have been very bitter and angry that no one wanted to let me at least TRY my hand at transcription, but I chose to learn everything I could while in the medical records office.  I started glancing through the charts, getting an idea of what finished dictations looked like, how they differed from office to office, what operative notes were, what lab tests looked like, consults, procedures… anything that could help me learn more about what I wanted to do. 

I am a hard worker, and because I made such an impression on the supervisor  in the medical records department, she introduced me to the transcription supervisor and told her I had trained to be an MT.  It just so happened they had an opening, so she decided to give me a chance.  FINALLY!  The moment I had been waiting for!

I started out just doing a couple of dictations for an endocrinologist (turns out, no one else wanted to do his dictation).  I surprised everyone with how well I did and was soon transferred from medical records to the transcription department…. YAY!  Once I was proficient with the endocrinologist, I was asked to take on another physician, a cardiologist.  It wasn’t long after that I was asked to take on an internal medicine physician.  It ended up that I was one of a select few who had the speed and accuracy to handle the dictation for three physicians.  I also usually picked up any extra that I could to help other MTs out.  I may have been taken advantage of in this area, but I didn’t care, I was learning as much as I could so I could eventually work from home, and they would still be stuck in the office…

It was during my two years of working at the clinic I met one of my best friends.  She didn’t stay there long, only three months, but we’ve been friends ever since.   She had been an MT for 16+ years when she came to work at the clinic.  She had lots of Stedman’s Word Books that I had never seen before.  I was very impressed and constantly borrowed her books to look up terminology or asked her to listen to difficult areas.  She could not believe that I was the product of a correspondence school, being that they tend to ill prepare one for this industry.   We forged a close friendship during that time, and when she left to work from home again, we kept in touch.

About six months after my friend left, I called her to vent about the clinic hierarchy being obstinate about a proposal I had researched and carefully laid out to allow some MTs to work from home… i.e. ME.  She was telling me about how great the national transcription company was that she was working for at the time and said to send in my application, that she would make sure the powers that be would take a look. 

Long story short, I got the job!  Finally, after taking the correspondence course (that I dragged out over two years) and two years of working in a clinic, I was going to be able to work from home!  I started out on a middle-range account for a clinic out of Minnesota, then within six months moved to being a “specialist” on that account (more money), then within six months of that to one of the highest paid accounts they had… UCLA.  I loved learning new specialties and kept adding as many as I could to my repertoire.  

I have worked for other companies since that time, and the physicians from my first clinic actually called ME when they started their own practices.  I’ve been an independent contractor and an employee.  I’ve worked for some incredible people and some real awful people.  I don’t claim to know everything, but my track record doesn’t lie.  I do know what I’m doing… most of the time anyway!