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Serving Over 20,000 US Medical Transcriptionists

Dictators getting worse all over.

Posted By: Hammer on 2009-09-17
In Reply to: MDI, less work? good dictators disappearing? - me

More and more ESLs. Many younger doctors not as 'literary' as older (retiring) doctors, may have opted out of language and literature courses in school in favor of science courses. In some cases good dictators requiring less proficiency to transcribe may be sent offshore or routed to VR. Seems to me that some younger doctors don't care much about documenting their work and don't spend any time preparing a dictation in advance, then fly through it just to get it over with.


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Good dictators end up on ASR so it can only get worse. My accounts are all picked over.
:
Definitely not TransTech -- gets worse and worse with no work each and every day and who cares???

NOBODY, except the MT's who are making less and less money and losing whatever comfortable lifestyle they had previously had the pleasure to live.  Unless you have more than 1 member in the household to bring in the money, or you have received an inheritance from family member, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY TO MAKE A LIVING AT Transtech anymore.  They absolutely DON'T CARE either.  TransTech mgmt will not talk about it; only promises of new accounts coming on . . . ha !  Possibly an overflow account to replace the LOST account. 


I so wish mgmt's paychecks would be affected by this NO WORK situation that has been going on for more than a year now and they would get out of that Houston high-dollar office and FIND US MT's some WORK !


Pay for MT work is getting worse and worse!!!! NM
X
And the reports look worse and worse
Any VR program and system into which it is imported is fraught with problems. At my local hospital, they have editors editing the editors. The reports are still full of mistakes and bad formatting. At my local radiology group, they have 5 different programs ranging from a combination of EMR point and click to front end SR. The MTs spend their whole day patching together the various parts of the patient record to make one cohesive record. The IT department has ballooned from 2 to 7. They only got rid of 3 MTs but exchanged them for 5 ITs. A local doctor uses point and click EMR and spends the whole patient visit with his snoot glued to the computer. The patient sits there crying and he isn't paying attention. It takes him 20 minutes to complete the record and then charges the patient for the extra time inside the room because of his bad choices or the practice manager in record keeping. I know all this first hand. I wonder when they will realize the boondoggle they have bought into.
Dictators
Actually, yes. The dictators are very good and the variety was also a good mix.
How many dictators a day do you do who
speak clearly, enunciate each word, isn't eating, chewing gum, or flipping through the chart while they are trying to dictate, who does umm, umm, umm every third word?   I don't think VR will be a threat any time soon, if ever. 
dictators
The majority are good. After a few times of transcribing them and with sample reports, not a problem
You must be getting my **not so bad** ones, then ! Let me have some of those dictators ! n/m
b
There is nothing worse
than this monopoly that is technically not a monopoly in this field. There is always an antagonist wherever you go. When we all loved our job, MQHATER was probably here.
It's worse when you can't see them.
It can get pretty tricky when you have to rely on your senses and your past experience to figure out that somebody is either assigning the good dictators to themselves or assigning the bad dictators to you.

I have left more than one account when I found out that they assign work to MTs some or all of the time. I've never heard a valid justification for it. Anytime there is human intervention in assigning work there is the potential for abuse. Let the machine do the assigning--oldest job first.
worse pay ever
Making less than I did 12 years ago.  This is very very sad for this industry.  Anybody have any good companies to refer.
Spi getting worse

I started when they were Cymed, just about a year ago.  Since the merge, the payroll company has twice not paid people in certain areas due to problems and just within the last month, we got an email that the payroll company lost a laptop with employee banking information on it.


Don't expect any communication from anybody with this company.  You may get emails from somebody with no name associated with the email, no title, anything. You have no idea who you are hearing from. 


If you are an editor, you better be very flexible.  You may have to cross servers and handle up to 30 accounts to find maybe 6 good hours of work.  Moveup for editors is based on line production and some of the accounts don't even count lines.  Let's not forget a great many require log sheets, that's very time consuming. 


I don't know what exactly the account managers do because the lead QAs run the show.  Don't expect an answer if you email the account manager with a question. My account has a lead who is power hungry and even uses initials after her name that just means she is a member of a group, not professional affiliation.  I've seen 3 very well-qualified people, MTs and editors, just quit without notice after being fed up.  I've seen MTs left on full QA for 6-7 months, not because they were bad, but because nobody noticed they needed taken off.  I am just disgusted.


 


I would get out before it gets even worse
This sounds like Focus Infomatics. I worked for them for about a month almost 2 years ago and quit right away. They don't communicate with you and, yes, everyone you deal with will be in India. They have a main office in Massachusetts, but they only do the Payroll and things of that nature. When they did communicate with me, they were usually very rude and hard to understand. The training was HORRID! There was such a language barrier that I could not understand a word they said. I finally quit and went with a US based company. It will only get worse!
better or worse cpl than MQ?
thx
AND.... Get this - this is worse
You have to meet minimum line counts for preceding 6 out of 8 pay periods (not only day before, day of and day after) but FOUR MONTHS of minimum line count and if your account runs out of work or you use PTO that would cause you to have less than the minimum line count TOO BAD.

You also cannot take off any time the 2 weeks prior to the holiday nor the day after the holiday for any reason.
Is this for the better or worse?
.
What is the best for one is the worse
x
Worse (sm)
Having worked at both, I'd say stay away from both. Precyse's VR editing is very bad at picking up anything and invents things. If you're at precyse just stay transcribing and be glad you didnt waste your time.
Just gets worse each day
VR is a joke..
No better and no worse than any other. nm
xxx
NO and it seems to be getting worse..
on many levels.
Hispanic Dictators
Hopefully its not De Tar Navarro. That's an awful account.  They have quite a few of "mush mouth" RN's who dictate for the doctors.  You don't get samples, so you pretty much wing it.  At least you don't get the defy's (QA markers at MQ) counted against you!!  De Tar is all progress notes and a few discharge summaries.  You're lucky if you can get 3/4 of your required line count!! Other than that account, the others were pretty easy (with the exception of those bad quality sound files that is).
They are in a folder as are they for a ton of dictators.
Unfortunately, there are TONS of them that I have to scroll through. Even though they are alphabetized by dictators last name, it is very time consuming.
Difficult dictators?
So MDI-FL and WebMedx both have decent health insurance for a decent price? And what do we have to do to get that? Are they all ESL? Or do they truly have decent dictators where you can make some money.  I have done very few ESL. What typing speed are they looking for?
Been there . . . this is actually a step up on dictators for me!!! NM
NM
Depends on who the dictators will be.
At Spheris, I got paid 0.09 for acute care but only 0.075 for ER work.

I could do nearly twice the lines of ER work, though, because of better dictators.

So, I pushed to do as much ER work as possible and made considerably more money.


Yep REALLY low job #'s from dictators from hell

slow dictators
but can't you speed them up with ExText so they sound like chipmunks, hahaha....
Some of these cesspool dictators would not...........sm
actually be so bad if there wasn't so much background noise and you could hear what they were actually saying!
Awful dictators

Awful dictators.  They cannot keep people on this ortho account.  The sound is so muffled, you cannot understand even an otherwise very clear dictator.  They do not have a website.


We could say the same thing about their ESL dictators...sm
who are making a 6-figure fortune off of our backs...while they pay us pennies.  Learn the language, at least!
definitely horrid dictators...
and the account specifics would make you nuts. specifically, they wanted tables edited that would take about 15 mins/per @ 4 cpl. also we kept running out of work, so yea, at $7/hour I quit and am doing just fine now back on clinic work.
Stuttering dictators

Just wondering what you all think about this:  Should a doctor who obviously has a terrible problem with ssssstuttering be dictating?  Seems like it might be an invitation for errors on the poor patient's medical record.  What do you think?


 


but if the company has dictators sm

who dictate like this then YES it is fair to test you on those.  It does no good to give you a good dictator (whatever you deem to be good) and then most of the dictators of of the caliber you had on the test.  It is very fair and honest to the potential employee.  What happens if you test on a dictator that is good and then your account has the really bad ones?  Is that fair to you or the company?


It use to be that folks in the MT profession accepted this as part of the profession and none of this was ever a point.  Seems now MT has come down to lines, spaces, cpl and all the rest and forget the real reason behind this profession, THE PATIENTS!


MDI is just as bad if not worse. No work.
x
Ok, so this is hopefully just worse than usual? sm
Do I have to let them know to hop on at other times, or is it understood that it's necessary?

thanks much for your help!!!
7 months later and worse than ever!!!
I was under a 90 probationary period. I just started the beginning of December and put on a 2nd probation period after hearing how accounts didn't pull through that were to start Jan. 1st. Their pay by the hour is a scam. They don't have enough work to put in a full day of work. You sit there 19 hours just to get 600 lines worth of work, you log 8 hours and they go through your time sheet and change it to 2 hours. Thats 300 lines an hour. You follow account specifics, such as use patient name, and they count it against ya, grade your audit bad because of it, and terminate you for nothing. Supposed to pass 3 out of 5 audits. They already had their decision made by Wednesday, the 3rd day, without grading the last 2 days. Passed the 1st day of audit and terminated Wednesday without working Thursday or Friday. Just a scam and low-down!!!
Also the platform they use now is WORSE than the one before, if you can believe that (sm)
Stay away!!
Yes, it could get worse but you can prevent that by
Please immediately get out of that situation -- even if you must take something temporarily.

Contact your mortgagor and, if your loan is FHA backed, then each state has an office designed to step in and mediate for you against your mortgagor in case of default.

Do not wait. You must take care of yourself and your family.

You are obviously extremely intelligent, responsible, and experienced.
Just because you have seen worse does not make it right. nm
nm
Went from bad (Transcend) to worse (sm)
I'm so glad you were able to dump SPI and hope you are happier with your new job(can't be worse)! I need to leave SPI too, but I don't want to take the first thing that comes along just to get out of here and get suckered again by another crap co.!

I came from a horrible company (Transcend). I went totally broke while working there. We were completely out of work for days on end. What little work we did get was being switched to VR (at a much lower cpl rate) which was just horrific since it was new. We were treatd as lab rats and were supposed to work just a few bugs out while our pay and line counts plummeted! The only time they communicated with us was to tell us we were doing something wrong, and when we had concerns about the VR, our pay, lack of work, etc., we were told to basically keep it to ourselves and not talk with other employees about it. They hated people that had a mind of their own and people who stood up for themselves at all.

I was desperate to get out of there and searched this board. I read great things about Cymed on this board, asked questions here, and it sounded good. I talked with the recruiter and asked some more questions. Again, sounded pretty good, but I never really looked into or compared other companies which was a HUGE mistake! As soon as Cymed offered me a job, I went for it without applying anywhere else.

Cymed wasn't great to begin with. Right away, probably within the first month, they started breaking promises, switched my account, and had poor communication, but it was still better than Transcend. Then came the SPI buyout, and good things about Cymed are disappearing.

Basically, I don't want to just research/test/interview with 1 co. like I did when I made this move. Even though I hate it here, I want to make sure I take more time, do more research, etc., so I don't end up going through all the hassles of switching companies only to get burned again by another crap co.

Sorry for the extremely long rant. I started off just wanting to wish you luck and saying good for you, but I'm so frustrated about my current situation that I guess I had to get it off my chest. Again, best of luck to you and thanks for listening to the rambling of a lunatic, LOL. =)
It's gonna get worse SM

When someone posted below who cares about construction workers that pretty well summed up the problem in general.  Everything is about 'me.'  Our America is on its way to becoming a Third World Country.  Watch the news sometime.


oops, Worse. nm
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What could be worse? I hate OSI
My husband wants me to flat out quit OSI, just walk out now and worry about finding something else later. I am very sorry for the MT's who don't have other means of income.
You could have not thought up a worse
Not surprising, though. Keep on trying! I'm sure you can justify theft a million other ways...Yeppers. A sewing machine, honestly.
Dude, nothing's worse than MQ right now.
nm
Or even WORSE, Medquist might buy both! :(
.
worse than Transcam? Now that is BAD
TY
know what makes it even worse?
I was in the hospital before I worked at home. I could see the Lanier system where our vendors would cherrypick. MTs who worked in-house would also cherrypick and you could actually see them skipping around. Now, I'm at home and, although I cannot see the system itself, I can see by the job numbers that it is still happening.

The worst thing about it? The clerks and bosses know about it and, guess what they do? NOTHING.
I have been in your shoes and perhaps worse sm
You don't need to explain yourself. You are here with a complaint about something a recruiter said to you, not so that others can pounce on you for not handling your personal difficulties! OF COURSE this didn't happen overnight and OF COURSE you have been working on it. I have had this very thing happen and it took many months to get ahead of it, but I did. I have faith that you can too.

I hang out here and I hope that like several others, I have a voice that is a voice of reason, maturity with more than a little heart in it. (Okay, so I am not the whiz kid of tech issues and some of you call me verbose and a braggart and I don't care.) Some days I come on here and think whew! Some of us need to go back to kindergarten and learn how to get along with others, learn to share, root for home team, share the ropes, hug our neighbors when they need it and understand that if we like our boo boos kissed better, then we need to do some boo boo kissin' too.

Now, I don't know about some of you with cold hearts and nasty fingers...but my mom told me several things growing up and I don't forget them even if I am olderer than dirt:
--if you can't say something nice, keep your mouth shut.
--you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
--if you want a friend, be a friend.
--if you hang your dirty laundry out to dry, it isn't going to get any cleaner.
--life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
--what goes around comes around.

I especially believe in that last one. I used to be a very angry, bitter person and I used to lash out and be nasty. Then I got sick. Then I came as close to dying as I want to get for a very long time yet. I don't have my health and I might not have much time left either. I have grown thin and frail though I am not yet 50. I woke up one morning while I was recuperating and decided that since my life was going to be shorter than I thought, so I had better shape up before I got shipped out for good. I changed my attitude and I changed my life.

Today, I have spent years sowing seeds of gladness, seeds of caring, seeds of friendship, seeds of understanding and I find my life incredibly rich and full.

I know that all of you who have to rip others apart have small, unhappy lives and you can't see that you have a major role in that, in fact, you have the STARRING ROLE. I feel sorry for you and you know who you are. I feel sorry for you because you are always going to have an unhappy, unfulfilled life because WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND.

sorry, I had to rant and it is off topic, but not exactly.
Probably the worse 13 cpl you will ever work for.
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