So this is supposed to bring in more MTs

So this is supposed to bring in more MTs? [2006-03-16]
After graduation, they want you to take a two-year apprenticeship.

Outsourcing [2008-04-22]
I worked for an imaging center (I was already gone) that laid off the MT's and outsourced the work back in 2002. It lasted about a month. The doctors got mad and insisted to the suits to bring the MT back. They wasted so much time correcting and filling in blanks. They were spoiled with their MT and even stated that they did not read their reports when they signed them because they had that much confidence in the MT. Good news for the MT, she came back and demanded more money...and got it. Lesson learned.

The Top 10 Reasons to Become a Medical Transcriptionist [2006-01-19]
January 17th 2006Work From Home You've seen the commercials: medical transcriptionists are in high demand. Should you consider this field? Below are the top ten best reasons to become a medical transcriptionist. If these characteristics are something you're looking for in a job, then medical transcription may be for you. To get started, try “Working at Home the American Way in Medical Transcription” by Debra Jan Hebert, an experienced (http://medtrans4u.com) medical transcriptionist. 10. Quick entryMany lucrative professions require extensive training and advanced degrees. Other jobs in the medical field can take eight or more years of grueling, expensive schooling to begin. In medical transcription, you can begin your work in a year or less, avoiding huge debts and student loans. Some employers require no training, especially not if you already have good English skills and some experience in a medical field. 9. Contribute to societyAs a medical transcriptionist, you can contribute to society in many ways. In addition to the economic contributions you'll make to the overall economy, experienced medical transcriptionists become well-versed enough to catch errors or even act as patient advocates. Medical transcriptionists can see inconsistencies and correct them as well. By quickly returning transcripts to hospitals, private practices and individual doctors, medical transcriptionists can ensure fast patient care in the medical system. 8. Work from homeWhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 70% of medical transcriptionists still work in hospitals or physicians' offices, medical transcription is becoming increasingly popular as a work-from-home profession. The convenience of a home office appeals to some people on its own virtues, while parents may value the opportunity to stay close to their young children and still support the family full time. No matter what the reason, if you're looking to work from home, you should seriously consider medical transcription. 7. Excellent payWhile compensation methods may vary, almost all medical transcriptionists enjoy excellent pay, even in entry-level positions. According to (http://medtrans4u.com) DJS Enterprises, you can earn as much as $50,000 to $80,000 a year as a medical transcriptionist. If your pay is production-based, as you gain more experience and dexterity in medical transcription your salary will steadily increase. If you're looking for a job that can really support your family working from home, medical transcription may be for you. 6. Job securityThe US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the job outlook for medical transcriptionists is definitely positive. The medical transcription field is expected to grow at a faster than average rate through the year 2014. This indicates that medical transcriptionists will have plenty of opportunities to find steady work, even if they work at home on a freelance basis for at least another 8 years. 5. Job satisfactionWhile job satisfaction may vary from job to job and person to person, if you enjoy being able to visibly track the progress you've made in a day, medical transcription can bring you a high level of job satisfaction. As your completed medical reports pile up, you'll be able to see how much you've accomplished. 4. Set your own hoursMost of the medical industry operates 24 hours a day. Many hospital and at-home medical transcriptionists are able to set their own hours at any time to accommodate their families or other commitments. No matter when you're able to work, there's a medical record waiting to be transcribed. In medical transcription, you can work when it's most convenient for you. 3. Comfortable work environmentWhether they work in a hospital, a private office or from home, medical transcriptionists enjoy a comfortable work environment. Noise levels are low, safety risks are minimal and strenuous labor is negligible. In medical transcription, you'll enjoy a comfortable office and dedicated work station to transcribe. And what could be more comfortable than working in your own home? 2. Transferable skillsMedical transcriptionists acquire many transferable skills that they can use in other jobs if ever they want to leave the industry. In addition to a basis in the medical field, transcriptionists learn skills that could apply as a court reporter or an administrative assistant. Transcriptionists also develop their English skills, which can be useful in all types of positions that involve writing and editing. Whether medical transcription is a step on your path or your dream job, the skills you learn can improve your overall career outlook. 1. Rewarding workWhy do people become doctors? The vast majority of the people who endure 8 or more years of schooling and incur substantial debts and student loans to become doctors do so because they love to help people and to cure them of their illnesses. Every member of the medical field helps in this endeavor. What could be more rewarding than to contribute to the speedy treatment of people who desperately need your help? If these ten things sound like characteristics you're looking for in a job, look into medical transcription. You can learn more about medical transcription from books, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other materials online.

Philips, Citrix Co-Operation Enables [2005-09-21]
Philips, Citrix Co-Operation Enables Speech Recognition and Digital Dictation for 50 Million Professional Users World-Wide VIENNA, Austria--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 20, 2005--Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG)(AEX:PHI) announced today the release of an enhancement to the professional document creation platform SpeechMagic(TM) enabling for the first time adequate speech recognition in Citrix(R) environments. With SpeechMagic supporting 23 recognition languages and providing a portfolio of more than 150 recognition vocabularies for the medical, legal, governmental and financial sectors, potentially more than 50 million Citrix users worldwide can now benefit from increased documentation efficiency and reduced operating costs. The deployment of speech recognition and digital dictation applications from Citrix servers will be a key factor in more efficient documentation workflow. It will also enable the centralization of IT administration, and bring critical speech recognition features such as automatic learning and acoustic adaptation - significantly reducing the strain on financial and human resources. By centralizing applications and the delivery of data, Citrix and SpeechMagic are able to provide an extremely high level of security (no files are stored locally), dramatically improving the protection of personal data. By adding bi-directional audio capabilities, Citrix enabled the digital recordings to be uploaded and Philips developed a real-time speech recognition channel. This channel improves the usability of dictation hardware, such as the industry-leading Philips SpeechMike and allows for the deployment of the full range of speech recognition features within a Citrix environment. Numerous authors can now dictate simultaneously anywhere within the Citrix network and either delegate the dictation to a secretary/ Transcriptionist or correct it themselves. Citrix infrastructure is popular with large institutions in the healthcare, legal and finance industries. With SpeechMagic being geared towards industrial-grade document creation, our award-winning platform has been optimized for these industries, says Marcel Wassink, Managing Director Philips Speech Recognition Systems. This co-operation with Citrix opens the door to a vast new market for Philips and its partners. As a worldwide leader in Speech Technologies, we're delighted to be working closely with Philips. SpeechMagic brings tremendous value to our customers in significantly increasing their documentation efficiency and hence improving the return on their investment in Citrix Access Infrastructure, said David Jones, corporate vice president, business development, for Citrix. SpeechMagic for Citrix will be presented live at the Citrix(R) iForum(TM) Global conference in Las Vegas, Nev., on October 9 - 12, 2005. The new component to the SpeechMagic platform will be released to the Philips global network of more than 200 integration partners on September 20, 2005.

Court records sent abroad [2005-08-25]
Trial and hearing tapes were farmed out to Hong Kong for transcription, in violation of rule Marion County judicial officials are investigating what appears to be an unprecedented security breach in which workers in Hong Kong prepared hearing and trial transcripts in a yet-to-be-determined number of cases. The outsourcing of what is supposed to be an in-house court function has alarmed Indianapolis judges because these records often contain sensitive information and are critical for appellate judges to understand what transpired in courtrooms months or years before. Local officials have informed the Indiana Supreme Court of the breach, and the court, which enforces rules on the handling of court records, is awaiting information from Marion County. This is prompting a thorough investigation, said Marion Superior Court Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson, a member of the court's three-person executive committee. We're talking about the record that goes up on appeal. If it's wrong, that's big stuff. She said no judge is believed to have authorized a court employee or court employees to send official trial tapes offshore. A spokesman for the Virginia-based National Association of Court Reporters said he was unaware of any U.S. court sending transcription work overseas and that the group has tried to determine whether it's going on. The best-quality transcript is prepared by someone who was present at the proceeding, said Marshall Jorpeland, the national group's communications director. The best-educated English speaker in Hong Kong isn't going to know street slang unless they've moved there from here. Other concerns include Social Security numbers appearing in transcripts, as well as the names and addresses of crime victims or their family members and sensitive information about employment or income, Jorpeland said. Marion County's judicial leaders are trying to figure out how much work was sent overseas in violation of a local court requirement that transcriptions be done in-house by county employees to protect against privacy violations -- including identity theft -- and to ensure accuracy. At least one court reporter has acknowledged some work on major felony cases was sent to a private firm, said Mark Renner, the Marion Superior Court administrator. Renner declined to release the name of the court reporter or the judge for whom the reporter works. The employee has not been reprimanded but could face disciplinary action, including a possible dismissal. Renner said the breach occurred after an experienced court reporter hired an Indianapolis transcription firm, Baynes Shirey, which does business as ClearPoint Legal, to prepare transcripts. That work was then outsourced to Scriptero, a Hong Kong company that has more than 50 clients from all over the world that demand at least 4,000 transcripts a year, according to court officials and the company's Web site. Neither company responded Tuesday to requests for comment. No one is accusing either firm of wrongdoing. Renner said he intends to send a letter today to Baynes Shirey asking for a complete list of proceedings the firm has transcribed for Marion County's court system. On its Internet site, Scriptero says it is often hired to transcribe depositions, which usually are closely reviewed for accuracy by participants, and that it uses only native-language transcriptionists. The Hong Kong firm boasts a 99.75 percent accuracy rate, but that's been of little consolation to local officials. This assignment of transcripts to anyone other than another Superior Court reporter shall cease immediately unless the Judge of your Court gives you express permission to so assign the responsibility of transcription to some outside entity, Renner wrote in an e-mail sent Friday to court officials. Renner said a Porter County judge notified Marion County officials of the breach last week after hearing about it from a member of the Indiana Shorthand Reporters Association An e-mail that was ultimately received by the Judge in Porter County from the company in Hong Kong confirmed that they had in fact been doing work from Marion County, including full transcripts from jury trials, Renner told court officials. Tina DeBone, president of the Indiana reporters association, said she blew the whistle to court officials but did not name any of the firms involved. She said no Porter County judges were involved. DeBone said she heard about the violation from a court reporter in Arizona who had been approached by the Hong Kong company. DeBone, a victim of identity theft, said she was worried about sensitive information falling into the hands of terrorists who might use it to enter the United States. Farming out transcription work is in complete violation of the reporter's contract that each reporter signed, Renner said in his e-mail. These contracts, signed with Marion Superior Court, do not provide for hiring private companies to do transcription work.

MedQuist Announces Key Findings of Independent Review [2005-08-05]
MedQuist Announces Key Findings of Independent Review of Client Billing MT. LAUREL, N.J., July 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MedQuist Inc. (MEDQ.PK), a leading provider of electronic medical transcription, health information and document management services, today announced the key findings of an independent review of the company's billing methods. The findings were presented to the company's Board of Directors, which initiated a broad program of changes and reforms to the company's business practices. The Board of Directors also took disciplinary action against certain company employees. The Board of Directors announced today changes in its senior management. Howard S. Hoffmann, an experienced and accomplished interim manager, has been appointed as MedQuist's interim CEO with a clear mission to implement the changes and reforms to the company's business practices, including its billing practices, and to bring the company current in its SEC filings. Steve Rusckowski, who had temporarily assumed the CEO position in December 2003 in addition to his Board position and led the company through the difficult period of the independent review, will continue as a member of the MedQuist Board. The Board also announced that it has accepted the resignations of its Chief Financial Officer, Brian Kearns, and its Chief Legal Officer, John Suender. This was an extremely thorough and comprehensive review that has clearly identified areas in which we must make changes and improvements, said Scott Weisenhoff, the lead Director on the review. Added Howard S. Hoffmann, who is also a principal and partner at Nightingale Associates, LLC, of Stamford, CT.: Our priority mission now is to work with our customers to clarify and, where appropriate, rectify any problems, make the needed changes and reforms internally, and become current in our SEC filings. The changes we are making address a pressing industry challenge and our goal is to ensure that billing methods are reliable, accurate, measurable and verifiable to customers using transcription services. We hope that our actions will encourage other medical transcription companies to address the challenge presented by AAMT line-based billing methods. Review Findings The review, conducted for the Board of Directors by Debevoise Plimpton LLP and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, identified a number of issues regarding the company's billing practices. The review found that with respect to its contracts that called for billing based on the AAMT line, the company used ratios and formulas to determine the number of AAMT transcription lines for which clients were billed rather than counting the number of relevant characters to determine a billable line as provided for in the contracts. With respect to these contracts, the company's use of ratios and formulas as a surrogate for counting was generally not disclosed to the clients. In addition, a company employee explained inaccurately to KPMG LLP (KPMG), the company's outside auditors, the computation of AAMT lines on one of the company's major transcription platforms. The use of ratios and formulas caused some clients to be billed more and some to be billed less than if the counting method provided for in the contracts had been used. In addition, the ratios and formulas for certain client accounts were changed by the company, generally without disclosure to clients, in order to affect profit margins. Due to the ambiguities inherent in the AAMT line definition and the limited extent of the information available to the company for earlier periods, the company is unable at this time to determine with any reasonable certainty the aggregate amount of overbilling. The AAMT line definition was originally developed in the early 1990s by three major medical transcription industry groups, including The American Association for Medical Transcription (AAMT). They defined a line as 65 characters and also defined the term character to include such things as macros and function keys. However, these definitions turned out to be inherently ambiguous and difficult to apply in practice. AAMT itself withdrew its endorsement of these units of measure in 1998. However, many buyers of transcription services have continued to purchase transcription services and issue requests-for-proposals that ask for quotes in AAMT line units. The review concluded that the rationale for using the ratios and formulas was to adopt a consistent and commercially reasonable billing method, given the lack of common standards in the industry and the ambiguities inherent in the AAMT definition. The review found no evidence that the amounts MedQuist billed clients, in general, were commercially unfair or inconsistent with what competitors would have charged. Moreover, MedQuist has been able to attract and retain clients in a competitive market. The next step for the company is to assess the financial impact on customers and on MedQuist. When the financial assessment has been finished and KPMG has completed its consideration of the review findings, and pending any additional work KPMG may believe appropriate to do as a result of the findings, MedQuist anticipates that KPMG will then be able to complete its audit of the company's 2003 financial statements and its review of MedQuist's interim quarterly results. Until KPMG's audit and review have been completed, MedQuist will be unable to finalize its financial statements and file its Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2003 and its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2004. The company also will likely not be able to file its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2004 in a timely manner. Because the company has not yet completed its financial assessment and the results have not been reviewed by KPMG, MedQuist is unable at this time to estimate with any reasonable certainty the effect that the review of its billing practices may have on its reported revenues, results of operations and financial position. MedQuist has also been informed by the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission that the SEC has opened a formal investigation of the company. The company will continue its efforts to cooperate with the SEC, as it has since it voluntarily advised the SEC of the company's review of its billing methods. Business Practice Reforms and Management Changes The Board of Directors has outlined a broad program of business practice changes and reforms that will be instituted beginning immediately. Highlights include: * Enhance a mandatory and formal ethics training program that was recently instituted. * Accelerate an existing program that is migrating clients from several disparate legacy billing platforms to the company's new platform, DocQment Enterprise Platform, or DEP. The company intends to utilize only consistent, client-verifiable billing units of measure. Additionally, the company will meet with clients currently billed on the basis of an AAMT line definition to determine an alternate and verifiable unit of measure acceptable to the client pending their agreement to convert to the new platform. MedQuist has succeeded in converting approximately 35% of its transcription revenue to DEP. * Develop definitive and clear protocols for count methodology and billing, institute periodic internal audits and new reporting mechanisms to make sure all billing systems are in accordance with client contracts. * Reform the contract review and administration process to clarify any ambiguous terms with respect to units of billing, and develop a centralized contracts administration database to track compliance with client contracts. * Expand the customer feedback system to allow entry, by any employee, of customer comments and complaints. * Assign a Chief Compliance Officer to develop, maintain and enforce compliance with all company policies and procedures. The Board also took disciplinary action against five MedQuist employees. Said Gregory Sebasky, MedQuist's President: We believe that we have done what is necessary and appropriate in light of the results of the review. We will continue to build a strong and motivated organization and continue MedQuist's commitment to a high standard of ethics and customer satisfaction. Statements in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the securities laws and regulations. These include statements regarding becoming current in SEC filings, solidifying relationships with our customers and any other expectations or anticipated events. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.