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so, it wasn't put on paper that you are terminated

Posted By: because of production? on 2009-09-06
In Reply to: Softscript double whammy - Flybabymt

nm


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I would hope they were terminated
If you cannot do the requirements and you face getting docked, you are going to let work just go thru without correcting it, something that is a legal document. I would hope they do not have their jobs long. The MTs are the disaster here, not VR.
not paid and got terminated for asking for my check
i got terminated for requesting them for the work i did. i had full proof of all the work i had done including a spreadsheet for keeping track of th eline count. this is a scam and i am totally discouraged.
If anyone has either resigned or been terminated from Amphion,
I would appreciate knowing how the process went.  Thanks.
Terminated after doing a very short amount of reports
I was hired by company A, whom I found out subcontracts from company B which is a large medical transcription company in California.  I worked for the second company for several years, and all of a sudden, no work  well getting hired by Company A  I found out why.  I transcribed a total of 3-4 reports for company A yesterday and today, and they wanted things such as pulse ox' and subcutaneous, etc  -- got called on the carpet if these abbreviations were expanded or spelled out.  I have been an MT for over 25 years and to me, when it is abbrevations like this, it sends a red flag in my mind as to quality.  If you want further information, please email me privately
Do you mean only SR people terminated, straight transcription ok? (Sm)
Surely they would give editors a chance to change to straight typing. Maybe I am misunderstanding this.
I call either way TERMINATED and unless you committed some grievous act....
File, girlfriend...Go get 'em!!!
That wasn't my experience there. I wasn't on that kind of all-inclusive acct, either. nm
s
The paper says 45 days.
I hope it isn't 45 working days.
paper work

I currently work for Phoenix and the paper work they send is for your use.  It explains the doctors accounts and also has examples of the doctor work, so when or if you have a question, you can refer to these files. It is your choice to print them out or not.


I believe they have both, DD and paper check.
Extext and Escription, in my opinion, are the best platforms out there.  Extext is a little more difficult, but Escript is totally awesome and very user friendly.  TTS has had pay issues in the past (which you will find a lot of negative posts on here regarding that).  I have worked here for almost a year now and have never had a single issue with my paycheck.  Always on time!  Feel free to email me if I can help further.
I haven't seen an MT job in the paper since the mid-80s!
X
carbon paper... sm
Not just onionskin but erasable onionskin... oh, yay!

Pale green eraser pencil with brush on the other end for boo-boos.

I'm going to bet that most dictators under the age of 40 have absolutely NO idea what they mean when they say CC to Dr. Jones...
If you are an IC, the printer, ink and paper are tax
x
First check will probably be paper
NM
I think the first one is paper check. nm
nm
and .... that is no different than with paper records, so ...
nm
No. The paper they make you sign

says $125 (I guess to reimburse them for sending it to you in the first place) and for returning it.


Do be aware . . . paper checks only! (sm)

They don't offer direct deposit, just mailed, typed, handsigned checks, which can be  very hard to cash.


They don't communicate very well -- hard to get someone after 3pm EST if you have a problem.


At least one of their major accounts still uses a DOS platform and requires you to have this weird token thing that changes passwords every few minutes to log in.  You also have to get their footpedal and software.  So, if you're using their tools, their token, etc., how can you be an IC (since part of the definition of an IC is that you provide your own tools)?  Another company the IRS needs to look into, IMHO.


The DOS platform is so slow you can't make any kind of lines.  Instant Text works, but there is no way to save normals.


My son was about 17 when he asked me what carbon paper was! nm
X
That's funny didn't know they had it in the paper
I was told they recently moved somebody from another dept within the company to fill that position. She is definitely entry level, completely different field. Just goes to show.....
We may not have had to type on sticky paper
but MTs breaking into this business have their own set of challenges. I am a little tired being looked down on as a new MT, only 5 years, because it is so much easier. I beg to differ.

I went to school to be an MT. I have under my belt a 2-year Associates degree in Medical Transcription and a CareerStep class. I was hired by a national company who promised me a constant account with 2 backups, and I did not lie about my experience. I was at goal my first day of traning and have always had QA scores above the required average.

In return, I went to work and printed sample after sample after sample as we had over 100 doctors in my primary account alone. I learned new voices, new ways of pronouncing medications, and that some people still use kilograms as a unit of measurement. I faithfully made note of every blank I left and its correction so it would not be a blank again. I studied not only transcription but the other doctors names, specialties, area hospitals, local physicians, nursing homes, lakes and recreational facilities, highway and route numbers, and pretty much every possible place a person could work in the area.

My secondary account did not get as much attention initially, but 6 months after I started, my account was yanked and sent to India (where they no doubt know more about US geography than I do), so I repeated the process over again. So far I had made it a year and learned clinic notes, routine procedures (sometimes called OP notes), consultations, and ER transcription.

I had not lied about my experience, but it really didn't matter because one day I woke up, went to work, and was getting discharge summaries from a teaching hospital that I have never heard of. I was told that since I am doing so well that it was time to move on. LOL...it was more like no other team in the company could type that account so we got it. I typed it, cried, and typed it some more. Pretty soon, I was literally not making enough money to pay my bills after I paid my health insurance. I was not making my quota, which I had always regularly exceeded, and I was worried that I was going to lose my job for not producing. By the way, I am at a whopping 6.5 cents a line at this point.

I went looking for a job. I was recruited by a smaller MTSO by their president. He said that they were very supportive, like one big happy family, and they jump on a conference every month just to hash out any issues they have. I even got a 1 cpl raise. WOW...but, I am 3 months short of your 2-year minimum exeperience requirement. (I didn't lie).

I got the job anyway, and after 3-1/2 years, I have never jumped on a big ole conference call or had the opportunity to hash out any issues. Since being there, I have learned 10 accounts (repeat above learning process times 10), and I am still one of the highest producing MTs they have.

Again, I was handed a gift by my MTSO. I was given the opportunity to work on their self-described second hardest account because I was doing so well. Again, the message was sent by waking up one day and seeing it in my queue. I decided to be a team player because the company line is if you can do this, you can do anything. You will make bank.

Eventually, I was given another opportunity to help out on an account. This soon became my primary account because no one they trained on it could do it, and the account I was hired to do (and loved) was given to someone else. I figured if I was doing harder work (and the hardest they had),after 3 years I should get a raise.

No, I couldn't have a raise because they still had my primary account related to my pay scale. It didn't matter that even if I begged, I couldn't get that work. I was still what they considered a Level 1 MT. Shame on me, I went looking for another job.

I held that job for 1-1/2 weeks. I spent 3 days in training after waiting 2-1/2 months for my computer to arrive. It then took me another week to track down my production supervisor to be able to start working and get samples for my account. In our phone call, she apologized for taking so long (insert baby crying), but she was very busy as they had taken away her assistant and not replaced her (insert long pause as she IMs someone else). She was very hard to get a hold of now (insert baby crying again) but she would do what she could to get me started. I typed for 5 days and had 3 unanswered questions that were critical to me doing my work. I came back after a 2-day break to an e-mail that she was going to be gone for a week at a production supervisor meeting. Yes, I quit and without notice.

I was wise enough now to have not given up my current contract, and I decided to accept that they were going to pay me when they felt like it, but I was not going to take Level 1 pay for doing Level 3 work. I assumed that account full-time in June. I was off almost $800 that month even with the increased line rate (so much for making bank). By September I was back up to the production that was normal for me and raised my contract to 14,000 lines. Then last week, my boss tells me that we are backed up in OPs in this account.

I said that I would take them on as I had been practicing on them for quite some time. As I expected, my production dipped again. I knew I was not going to make 7000 lines, and I IM'd my supervisor that if I was going to be set for all OPs, I would need to readjust my contract back down.

The tizzy fit that she threw defies description, and I am back wishing for a new job. I told her simply that either we are in trouble for not meeting production or we are in trouble for not being a team player. I cannot produce 7000 lines of OP notes in a week, and I am not being terminated for not meeting my contract goals.

Is it fair that you have a single priority report that needs to be typed, and all I have to do is read the account notes (all xxx pages) and type it, BUT you are going to bash me if my production is off.

It is really easy for the MTSO
or management or whoever does it to complain that the quality isn't there or line counts aren't being met but wouldn't consider paying an ounce of training time to compensate you.

My husband is also self-employed. If I said to him, I know you regularly make xxx dollars an hour, but this is an emergency, and you are the only one who could do it, so would you mind spending 20 or 30 minutes learning how to do this. I know you may never have to do it again, and I won't pay you any more than what I normally would no matter how long it takes you, but would you do it to be a team player? I would STILL be taking that flying leap.

When you were back typing on sticky paper, did you regularly worry that you were going to have to stay an extra hour in the evening because the report you were on was taking too long? Did you spend your evenings researching doctors in Bullhead City, Arizona, and Columbus, Ohio, and in some little known town in Louisiana that has a clinic but barely even a zip code? Did you have to use Mapquest as one of your transcription tools so you could figure out where this guy on this account is from? Did your boss come to you and say there is a clinic 300 miles away that is behind, and I volunteered you to do their work? Don't leave, now, until you have 1000 lines in. And don't WHINE.

PS...how do you know they don't whine in India.
Saw on paper that pay was only 6 - 8.5 cpl. Is that what you guys will be starting at, or staying
m
On the front page of my morning paper
http://www.kingcountyjournal.com/sited/story/html/214991
I see a big ad in my paper for Heartland IS, many bad reviews on this board.

Stuff about them being sold and on their website is a big picture of....India? I am sort of new to the business, one of the MQ SE in the middle of the shuffle.  Are there any companies that are stable? I am tired of stress.  


 


I don't think so. What you see on paper or on the screen in black and white.
If it were me, I certainly would ask specifically the HR person or MTSO. Pick up the phone, dial their number, and ask. Never take a job, unless you know how and what you are getting paid for.

I do believe it means without spaces, but I could be wrong. Things change so fast in this industry, what it means one day, does not necessarily have the same definition tomorrow.
Tradeoff between paper use and system speed (sm).
If I have too many reference lists up in Excel and Wordpad, my system bogs down; Microsoft products are such memory hogs.
Any Spheris employees get paper checks?
Just had my direct deposit changed to a paper check.  Since payday is tomorrow, am wondering how long it will take to get my check--I am only two states away from HQ.  Thanks!
Any Spheris employees get paper checks
Wow, I was expecting it Monday.  That's good to hear!
I DID type on sticky paper and an IBM Selectric
Yes, I did stay an extra hour because a report was too long. The difference was I got paid for it and appreciated for it.

I agree with you. The cheap exploitation of the third world has driven a high percentage of this field into filthy trash and many of those managing it into slumlords. It went from MTs working from home to fill a need to just dirty bloodsucking middlemen looking for a place to weasel into and make a buck off the backs of others.

What do you mean that you have Thanksgiving with your family? What do you mean that your arms or back hurt after no time off for months? What do you mean that you need time off for a mammogram? Geeze. It's sick. It's just disgusting. I'm in it only because I've done it so long I'm not quite sure what else to do. I'm back at a hospital so I can be a PERSON again. The difference is night and day. I'm finding the hospitals are grossing-out on it, too, and outsourced MTs are thought of as those poor things and somewhat pitiful. Like a necessary evil they are trying to figure a way around.

LOL .. I'll bet you are write. UGH on the carbon paper ... sm
We typed in triplicate, so had to correct 3 documents each time I made a mistake.   Forget the good old days in this case ... I am going to give my PC a big hug right now! 
Webmedx first pay date DD or paper check?
Just wondering.  I know every place does something different.  I asked my STM, and she is trying to find out for me, but i thought this might be faster. 
mean black character on white paper
also called virtual black character or VBC. Spaces not paid for. Never do it. This is just horrible.
I wish I had kept the article out of the paper on Transcend outsourcing
The home office located (as you might know) close to Atlanta and it was listed as a top company for Georgia but was I surprised when the person speaking made no bones about their outsourcing and the reason they STATED for it, lack of American MTs. Well, ladies, who do you feel about that? I am sure someone posting on MTstars has this article because they did last time. Hopefully they can quote word for word.
I'll check paper tomorrow, but not sure about Broward,
zz
12/cpl, hsi, no travel time, no paper/products. Small town.
dd
Article in local paper about Spheris and outsourcing to India
Franklin-based Spheris Near Top of Medical Transcription Business
BY SHARON H. FITZGERALD

In today’s world of Palm Pilots and voice-recognition software, you might think the need for medical transcriptionists is waning. You would be wrong. Franklin-based Spheris employs more than 5,000 medical transcriptionists worldwide and is looking to hire more as its service to more than 200,000 physicians at health systems, hospitals and doctor groups continues to grow.

The world is changing because the demand for electronic medical records … is very high. Certainly there are some technologies being tried and adopted, such as speech-recognition technology or systems where the physician is required to key in his or her own information. Those are still in their infancy and hold some promise in the distant future. But for right now the work-flow habits of physicians and hospitals and the need to see many more patients and process them more efficiently is driving the demand for what we do to its highest levels, explains Harry Shaw, Spheris investor relations.

In July, Spheris was named No. 7 among the nation’s fastest-growing healthcare information technology companies. The designation was by the publication Healthcare Informatics, which also ranked Spheris 28th for total revenue. The company is the second largest in the medical transcription industry.

Spheris’ growth is in no small measure due to its December 2004 acquisition of HealthScribe (also known briefly as Avicis), which was No. 3 in the field. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Spheris gained a workforce of more than 1,800 transcriptionists. About 1,500 of those employees work at a centralized facility in Bangalore, India. Thus, says Shaw, the transaction gave Spheris a much-needed global perspective.

To service this increased demand that’s out there, having enough medical transcriptionists to do the work is a real challenge to the industry in general. One way to tackle that increased demand is to tap the resources that are available globally, he says. One of the neat things about having an operation based in India is that a lot of dictation is done at the end of the day after hours. So we get a lot of volume that comes in late in the evening, and if you follow the sun, that’s the morning time for India. They’re just starting their business day, so we can route a lot of volume that we get late in the day to India when transcriptionists are just coming to work.

Shaw says the fact that Spheris owns its international facility and employs its workers rather than subcontracting differentiates the company from similar businesses. In addition, all Spheris’ medical transcriptionists in the United States are either full-time or part-time employees of the company.

With more than 3,500 employees and additional sites in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Sterling, Va., Spheris depends on high-tech global systems to quickly turnaround client transcription. Here’s how the technology works: Spheris provides clients with a server and whatever voice-capture system the client prefers. That might be a hand-held device or it might be a phone number the client calls. Shaw says fulfillment shops ensure that the client — as well as transcriptionists — have the hardware and software necessary to do the job. Following a patient encounter, physicians and other healthcare providers dictate details such as patient history, diagnosis and medications prescribed. The voice files are sent to a data center in either Franklin, St. Petersburg or Sterling, then passed out to transcriptionists.

The technology play is critical for a company of our size, and it’s one of the advantages that we offer in terms of cost savings, he says. He acknowledges, however, the continued existence of sneaker net, with some physicians continuing to speak into a tape recorder; then tapes are picked up at the office for delivery to Spheris.

Most of Spheris’ U.S. transcriptionists work out of their homes, where they usually receive digitized voice files over the Internet. Spheris offers the client a variety of templates, or the client may have its own format. Turnaround time is 12 to 24 hours, Shaw says, although stat service is available.

As it is known today, Spheris is the result of a small Franklin company called Total eMed, which purchased the much larger EDiX from IDX Systems in June 2003. The resulting company was branded as Spheris. In November 2004, the company completed a recapitalization in which two private equity investors, Warburg Pincus and Soros Private Equity (now known as TowerBrook Capital Partners), acquired ownership. The management team, led by President and CEO Steven E. Simpson, also invested and continues to lead company operations.

Asked if an IPO is in Spheris’ future, Shaw says the company will take a cautious approach to that. We want to make sure that we stay disciplined around the acquisition of HealthScribe, making sure that we’re fully integrating all aspects of that. … We do have a growth strategy in mind, and that certainly is an option down the road.
No, we got a small Valentine's gift that looks like a paper weight/ memo holder??
nm
From time to time those paper checks aren't good!
nm
Wasn't right for me at all. nm
s
it wasn't a can you help out, it was I need everyone
to work extra. 
wasn't for me
pay was directly tied to quality and number of blanks you left.
Are your sure her name wasn't
I even talked with the owner over the discrepancies of my checks.  He gave me his word that the problem would be fixed --- it never was.  Your right, they should be sued, but who has the time and/or money to do such?  That's why they're still around.  One other thing -- I can't believe that a company like this is allowed to advertise on this website.  We have to follow rules as an MT when we chat.  Why shouldn't companies have the same stipulation.  With all the negativity with this company (and I can back it up with phone records, paystubs, etc), they should be banned from advertising here, or anywhere else!
No, she wasn't.

nm


Boy, it sure wasn't that way when I was there...sm

We were always behind, it seemed, and always asked to type more, more, more.  I'm not defending OSi, but this was in later part of 2006.  Wonder what has changed?  I can't believe, if this is the MK account, that they would send charts overseas.  They were so !#$# picky (MK) that I got put on probation for some really, really tiny errors.  Took me for a whirl and hurt my feelings, big time.


I had to quit just from mere principle.  Harsh, very harsh!  I can't imagine, from the quality I understand comes from India, that they would get away with making any errors whatsoever.  Neither here nor there now, I'm just amazed at how fast things changed.


thanks - I wasn't using the right box
sounds like mixed reviews. Guess you never know til you try it yourself.
It wasn't MTs that were let go, it was QA, as that

is now going to India.  I wonder how many accounts that CBAY will have this time next year. 


A company that I used to work for offshored work to India.  First it was just overflow because they couldn't stay in TAT, but then company saw how much they could save and sent more work to India.  The problem is they weren't QAing the work and was of such poor quality that the lost the account, which ultimately cost them their business. 


 


 


**wasn't
x
It wasn't all THAT bad for me

I will admit when I first started with Amphion, I HATED it! However, I was there for 4 months and only left because I was offered better pay somewhere else, also I was really running out of work bad on my primary account, I assume from overhiring. 


It is true about the mandatory OT, but I liked the money, so I did do some.  When I didn't do the OT, I was not reprimanded.  I attempted to quite because of the QA person on my accounts was really condescending and I just couldn't take it anymore.  I was talked into staying by the supervisor I had and I was even offered (later) a QA position there, but didn't take it.  My supervisor there was fantastic and wonderful.  I know they have other supervisors, but I couldn't tell you how they are/were. 


I fell upon hardtimes close to Christmas and was having to move back to my mother's to take care of her house, my husband lost his job, and after explaining my situation to my supervisor, they sent me a 300.00 dollar check to help me with getting the lights turned on at my mom's house.  I was informed I did not have to pay that back, but under the condition that I help someone else in need.  I did feel appreciated at Amphion, but as I stated, I needed higher pay and I needed affordable insurance.  With my account running so low with work, I just couldn't do those things, and it really made me sad that I had to leave. 


Yes, they are very picky about quality and really some of it was so minute that it was ridiculous.  However, if something ever happened with the company I am at now, I would go back.  Under the condition I was with the same supervisor. 


Anyway, I wish you the very best of luck with finding the company of your dreams.  I am now with Axolotl and like it very, very much.  Of course, there are a few bumps just about anywhere you go, but I enjoy my job. 


Good luck and take care


Wasn't here for that
so I couldn't say. I generally only pop in to research a company I may be considering because I know this is where to go to hear all the actual negatives and then some about a company which is why I felt compelled to say that my experience has not been the same as the other people. But whatever. I'll just take my positivity elsewhere since it apparently is unacceptable on this board. Oh, and I didn't take Carlotta's email that way. Then again, I'm not the one on here complaining.
No that wasn't me

MT Chat?  How do I find that?  Thanks


Are you saying your pay wasn't cut?
.