Medical Transcriptionist working from home

I work from home. I own an MT company in Theodore, Alabama, called Allstate Transcription (http://allstatetranscription.com) and am the director of a mentoring/apprenticeship/internship program for newly-graduated MTs called the AIM Program (http://www.aimprogram.info). If anyone has any questions about the field of medical transcription, please feel free to email or PM me. :thumbsup:

Hi, I am Melissa and I am pre-op for RNY at Centennial in Nashville and also a MT student. I am so glad to see your post. I am getting my online degree as we speak. I have only just begun. I am enjoying it so much already so far. I work in a hospital as the phone operator and also do misc. business offfice tasks and have always noticed big long medical words around me but never have been able to disect them and know their true meaning. Now when I come across a paper with a diagnosis I know pretty much what it is or relating to and I am just beginning lesson 3 on suffixes. The only thing that is bothering me is not knowing where to even start as far as getting the work and keeping the work. Maybe you could answer that question for me if you would?

Hi Melissa, I understand your confusion. Hopefully I can help. There are tons of companies (literally hundreds and hundreds) that hire MTs to work from home, and tons of website where you can access contact info for those companies. The problem is, very few companies will hire you without experience, and that is very frustrating after investing months on training in a field. The best bet, I think, starting out is to do one of two things...either get a job in-house (you already work at a hospital so you already have your foot in the door -- which is a blessing.) Or...if you prefer to work from home...complete a mentoring program or externship/intership, preferably with a company that will hire you on when you finish. What's the need for that and why would you want to postpone working as an MT any longer than you have to? The best comparison that I can make is this... I went to school originally and got an A.S. Degree as a Cardiopulmonary Technologist so that I could work in a cardiac cath lab. The first 1-1/2 years were classes training me about everything I thought I could possibly need to know. The last 2 semesters were hands-on clinical rotations throughout various cath labs in hospitals all over Florida. My GPA was 3.89 in classes. But you know what I found out? What they taught us in class was just the tip of the iceberg! There was so much more that I had to learn and the only way I was able to learn it was by hands-on experience under the wings of a seasoned CP tech. I probably learned more in those last 2 semesters than I did the entire time I was in school. Had they just turned me lose straight from those classes, changes are if I had been lucky enough to get a job, I might have made a really serious error or judgement call that could have resulted in someone being harmed or even die as a result. (Heaven forbid, but it is a possibility.) I could have easily given a patient the wrong medication, or broken a sterile field leading to an infection, or just not had enough experience to realize when something just wasn't right and that I needed to bring it to the cardiologist's attention. The same thing applies with MT training. After you've invested a lot of time and hard work into getting your certificate or degree...and no matter how well you did in the program, you are just beginning. You might easily type Klonopin instead of Clonidine as a medication...for example...and who knows what the repercussions might be if no one catches it. Remember, medical record reports are legal documents, too. If we put the wrong thing in a report and there are adverse results (i.e., something as simple as us putting that a CT scan showed a left renal mass instead of a right renal mass...and they scheduled the patient for a left nephrectomy instead of a right...like they almost did to my mother...) -- or 5 mg instead of 0.5 mg -- we can actually be held liable for the consequences! No matter how thorough you think the classes are that you are taking now, you will only seen the tip of the iceberg. I have been in this field since 1984 and there is not a day goes by that I don't learn something new even now. That's hard to imagine, isn't it? And it will always be like that in this field. Just when we think we have learned it all, they come up with something new or they change a rule and we have to learn things all over again. But that's part of what makes this such a wonderful field to be in, too! Never a dull moment and there's always something new to learn. I don't know too many MTs who are bored, that's for sure! So...if you do consider a mentoring program, you'll be giving yourself a chance to gain some real live hands-on experience and you'll learn things that they never even had a chance to touch on in school. I don't know about anyone else's mentoring programs, but I know that with the AIM Program, if you don't feel like you have learned more fin the first month than you did the entire time you were in school or training to be an MT, you will be my first person I've met who doesn't. There are several companies that offer mentoring programs. I can provide you the names of some of the others I know about so you can compare what they offer and talk to them, as well...and I encourage you to do that. At my AIM website you will find a detailed overview of our program to give you an idea of how things work. My guess is that most programs operate about the same...but you can do some research and see what you find out. If you want to try to get hired on first and skip the mentoring, again I suggest going to work in-house first...it's just better sometimes starting out because you have someone right there who can answer questions, listen to a word in question, etc. However, if you are adamant about working from home and want to try your luck at getting a job working from home with no experience, I can suggest some companies to check with and also can provide you with some websites to visit that have lists of company names and contact info. A few MT sites where you can get contact info for various MT companies that you might want to check out for starters are www.mtdaily.com, www.mtjobs.com, www.mtstars.com, and www.wahmts.com. I look forward to hearing from you again. Keep your chin up and set your goals high. If your goal is to be employed as an MT who is in high demand, and you decide to apply to our program, I can promise you that if accepted into the AIM Program, I will do everything I can to help you reach that goal. If you are in need of anything MT-related feel free to ask. And you are welcome to email me directly or send me a PM if you feel like. Take care and best of luck to you! Deb