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Those are big shoes to fill

Posted By: diddles on 2005-12-22
In Reply to: How to keep employees - Here is a novel idea

I guess you've never worked on the inside of an MTSO business, but you wouldn't believe how physicians and hospitals are chipping away at our pay by demanding lower rates from the MTSOs.  Some MTSOs that people on this site complain about offering offshored services to client did it to KEEP from losing their clients.  When it starts with the doctors and hospitals, what choice do the MTSOs have but to pass that on to the MTs?  It really is a vicious circle. 


Some MTSOs team up with schools and offer interships where an MT in training works for free for a period of time to gain experience.  Now trust me, THOSE savings are not passed on to the experienced MTs...that goes directly into the MTSO's pockets and those MTSO push their long-term, higher paid MTs out the door to save a few pennies with no trouble sleeping at night.


So what about a union?  You're right.  More jobs will be offshored.  More experienced MTs will lose their jobs.  Doesn't anyone remember what happened when the air traffic controllers went on strike and the president of our United States canned every single one of them and airports had to hire an entirely new staff of controllers?  Did you see airlines stop flying passengers?  Nope.  Managers worked triple shifts until restaffing occurred, oh, without extra pay since they were salarired.


I don't pretend to know the answers as to how an MTSO should run its business but honest communication, good benefits and wages that have been lost in just a few short years (less than 10) would be nice.  It should stick to its gun and promote keeping jobs in the states for the patients' sakes.  And for the Indian physicians who have organized and created their own MTSO's to keep their families in India employed should be boycotted.  MTs should educate anyone they know who uses a doctor to ask the physician where his/her transcription is done or if s/he even knows and use only physicians with American-based transcription.


Boycotts worked in South Carlolinia and other states to take down the Rebel flag. Why can't we have a similar affect?  Mostly because we are not organized (I did NOT say unionized) and we do not generate the media coverage necessary to affect change.


d~




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I have put myself in her shoes.
If she does not feel she is cut out to roll with the punches, she needs to find a job with a company that offers a mentoring program. If she is a regular MT with Spheris, she is expected to meet the same QA scoring guidelines as everyone else or risk being terminated.

Most companies cannot baby newbies. They just don't have the staff to do this. She needs to find a company that offers mentoring for newbies and stop complaining...or she needs to bite the bullet and try to do the work.

I felt overwhelmed when I first started in acute care. I found that it was helpful to type a blank on parts where I was having trouble and transcribe the entire report and go back to the blanks and listen again a few times. I was often able to figure them out.

I had to work ten hour a day when I started out in order to meet my quota, but I did it and it has paid off for me.
you are not in my shoes, so .......
if you are not, how do you know what the situation is for me, personally? So, your experience has been good. Others have shared with me in private that it has not been so good for them, either. I am not alone in this, so please do not criticize my opinion, okay??
Been in your shoes
I too started out in clinics about 5 years ago and was managed to be hired by a local hospital. Well...5 years later I'm working at Diskriter in their QA department. You can do it, it will come. Don't give up, it's worth it in the end.
Been in your shoes
Sorry but I've been in your shoes and did not like it one bit.  I know this profession sucks but leaving the house for $10 an hour sucks too after taxes, gas, clothes, lunches, etc.  I choose to work for 3 services to never again run out of work.  I never work more than 10 hours a day (which is what it would amount to if I worked outside the house including driving there, being stuck in traffic, working and then driving home.) I was MTSO of my own company for 8 years until the hospitals kept taking longer and longer to pay and then suddenly there were all these woman who had taken the course and believed the hype and were willing to work for $.08 a line and then I was out of work.  It that time I made $.14 per line and paid my subs $.11.  I was good to them.  I even kept most of the crappy dictators and did them myself so I've been on both sides of this job. I've worked for the services who don't pay or won't pay, who have no work.  This job is not what it used to be but I've decided it is where I need to be right now so I will make the best of it. My family is coming off of 4 very lean years and I won't go there again.  I'm all for helping someone who is trying to help themselves but not for people who want a pity party...and if I made $3 a day at my job I'd be finding out why and doing something about it.
I was in your shoes!
Mine were exactly the same ages as yours. It is very difficult to manage a home, 3 babies and work. My hat is off to you. I was able to get most of my work done when my hubby was home at night and on the weekends, but when I got real backed up, I would hire one of the teens in my neighborhood to come sit for a couple of hours so I could work uninterrupted.

Good luck to you and God bless you. You have your hads full....BUT they grow up so fast, believe it or not, someday you will miss these times. :-)
Walk in my shoes

I am very small MTSO and it still gets hairy with turn around time.  All it takes is for one I/C to say, today I don't want to work -- which they can -- like the one above said, I want to work when  I want to and do as much as I want -- and suddenly she decides not to work, well suddenly that leaves 1000 to 3000 lines to be spread around, times that by 2 and what a mess.  You cannot control what and how much the docs dictate.  I would not hire someone unless they were strictly for overflow without somewhat of a committment whether it be the lines or time that the could do on specific days.  Imagine having 15 people with this attitude.  Like I said walk in my shoes, it is a balancing act.  Too much work, they gripe -- too little they gripe.   But someone that wants to work when they want, how much they want could not budget accounts that way.  It would be strictly overflow and then if you weren't available when the work was you probably would not stick around nor again would I keep you around.   Sure an IC can set their own hours but I expect a certain amount of work done in a certain amount of time to meet my TAT and not be docked because we didn't. 


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.
I DID wear the same shoes as others..
HENCE, where I am now. So there.
I was in your shoes not that long ago

I had 3 under the age of 5 at home.  I've worked both statutory/IC (the only difference is that statutory means they take out the federal taxes and IC doesn't)and employee positions.  By far, the best for me was statutory.  Even now that my kids are all in school, statutory is still better because of summer vacations.


Some things to remember:  Most employee positions require you to punch a timeclock.  Some companies let you get your work done in a 12-hour window, others require you to work just the shift your scheduled for.  The employee position I had did not give you the window. 


My employee position also required me to produce so many lines per hour, even though I was paid by production not hourly.  Therefore, if you are scheduled 6 hours and had to produce 100 lines per hour, you needed to have 600 lines in by the time you clocked out.  If you got interrupted by 1 of your kids, you had to either clock out and make the time up at the end of your shift (which no one feels like doing) or stay clocked in, try to handle the problem in a few minutes, and hope you make your 100 lines per hour.  Of course, the line requirement was averaged over the week or payperiod (can't remember which now), so I always went with the second option of staying clocked in rather than having to make up time at the end of my shift.  But, anything that took more than a few minutes to handle, you'd better clock out or else Big Brother will report you for stealing from the company.


There are some downsides to statutory.  You do not get benefits.  If you want a day off, you take it, but you don't get paid for it.  You also don't get time and a half.  You work what you work and get paid the same amount, unless you're with a company that pays incentives/bonuses for anything over a certain amount. 


I honestly can't say much else about statutory.  It's my favorite.  The flexibility is just too good to pass by when you have little ones at home. 


I won't comment on companies to work for.  Too many people like to argue when you try to post something positive about a company.  Read the archives, decide on 2 or 3 companies, then ask about those companies.  It's just too broad otherwise.


Having worn your shoes,

I feel your pain.  I've worked for a couple of companies that went offshore, also.  In one I was transcribing Social Security disability evaluations.  Those went to the Philippines. 


Picture this:  Your full name, DOB and SSN, as well as details of all your physical and mental disabilities, going to another  country,  potentially to be stolen and used by identity thieves.  The US government contracting to have its work done by a company that sends the work to a foreign country. 


Inconceivable to me at the time.  Still makes no sense, but then I'm obviously not management material. 


Great post! In the same shoes you are! sm
I'm not worried anymore, though. I made it through my probationary period with lots of ups and downs, a lot of tough dictators, one that I STILL cannot understand and I do this guy EVERY DAY!  But I like the job, like the QA people I have and have finally made it up to line count and I've been there since December. Now, to stay there....  Nice group of people. I like it a lot.  Don't know what account you are on but I logged off just a while ago and the stats were still coming in. LOL 
I've been in your shoes, with 3 kids, but (sm)
there is a very fine line to walk between hiring enough people for a new account and putting them somewhere until it actually starts, and overhiring.  You want enough people, not too many, not too few.  Try walking that line sometime. I have, and you usually get flak from both sides.  Hang in there.
But what if the shoes doesn't fit? What then? What about TT getting unfairly
bashed here from some anonymous poster who can come on here and say anything?
Do not judge unless you have been in their shoes. I worked for another sm
company that went through the exact same thing for 2 years. They were too big for small company insurance and do not have enough people that want insurance to qualify for large group. They would get all the way to the final contract and the insurance company would double the rate.

Keystrokes has been trying to get this resolved for a year. The reason for the information is because each company wants different things.

I spoke with someone very high up in the company about this. She told me that they get close and then something happens to change it, like the insurance company backs out due to too many health issues or that they decide that the group is not diverse enough. Keystrokes employs mostly women. The insurance companies do like this because women tend to go to the doctor more.

I do know that they are going to pay a portion though.

I think that the shame should be on you. Do you think that you are helping by complaining on a public board? There are 500 happy employees and just a handful who come to the boards to bash them. This is worse than high school.
let the MTSOs step in the MTs shoes - sm
If they cant pay a decent wage, them maybe it is time to let some of the clients go and work for yourself. It is just like MTs, if you accept a low rate of pay that is what you get. Stand up for yourself MTSOs and ask for more money. Get a back bone.
We're all moody at times. I would never want to be in the shoes of one of the sm
big service owners. I imagine I would be postal, not just moody. I could never run a service of that size and be in a good mood all the time, could you? Have you tried? Didn't think so.
We have work. I've been in your shoes though with other jobs
They are screaming desperately, I get the job, and the second day of the job, there is no work so I sat there all afternoon twiddling my thumbs. By day 3, when I was told there was only 3 reports to do, I quit. Life's too short to waste my time and energy.
Can you fill me in, too?
I have done acute care for 17+ years. thanks
Had to fill all of it in when I left.
`
demographic fill-ins
Top-of-the-line platforms will fill in demogrpahic screen automatically (if docs enter right numbers in the first place), and it's wonderful.  Other platforms will fill in partially, and on the ancient and/or practically obsolete ones, the MT has to fill in everything.   Also, most of us don't get paid to fill out our production sheets, etc., either.  When I worked in-house at 2 hospitals, we did get credit for time away from keyboard, like answering phone, filling in time cards, in-service education, etc.; they had a formula for it and it was pretty fair compensation.  Buth, that was then . . .
agree. you could also fill that cup the other way
and say bad credit implies one will work harder to keep afloat.

Also agree about checking a company's credit - HOW MANY TIMES have we heard 'they don't pay'? Is that not what gets reported? and relevant here?
If you didn't have to fill out
a 6-page application, you are lucky. I remember it being very tedious to fill out multiple applications, clicking off which specialties I had done, not being absolutely clear if they meant cardiology within a hospital setting or if they actually wanted to know if I had CLINIC cardiology experience, etc.

Working at home can make lots of people cranky. That's why MTs tend to have a reputation for being difficult. Or maybe a glycerin suppository and some MiraLax would help, LOL.
Yes they hire from outside and need to fill
QA doesn't always pay the bills.
You must have been on an old platform. That's my point - we don't have to fill in anything on
Its all computerized. You hit a search button, and then accept.  That's not even 1 keystroke! Same thing with doctor searches, etc.  You can run searches at a click by first name, last name, specialty - you name it. It takes seconds to find a doctor and then you just click "accept", and it fills in for you in the body of the report! Its great! I tried other companies lately, and its so antiquated.  Back to paper lists and shuffling thru pages and pages of name, manually entering or correcting demos - Yuck. Five minutes til you get into even the first line of report! No thanks!
I just have to fill in patient's name and everything else is automated and

even filling in the patient's name is made easy, I just type it and enter and it goes where it needs to do and then I type.  The work is batched so I just keep typing until I have 10 -12 pages and then send, again all automated and then start another batch. 


I worked for YOG for a short time years ago and they had so many demographics it took at least 5 minutes to fill them in, had to constantly look up stuff on the lists to find correct info and never got the same doctors twice to be able to learn doctor's information so you didn't have to keep looking it up.


My server has never been down, except during hurricanes last year, so no down time.  A couple of times the hospital's server has been down and I've been able to get my lines, though had to take a break during my regular shift and work a little longer in the evening.  Never went a day with NO work.  System never locks up.


 


You fill in a time sheet
but why dread it? attitude is 60% of the challenge (or more). You might just like it better, i do.
oh wait, let me fill in the blanks:

you must be a bitter person to hate your job so much


there's no way VR will be able to do all the accents


once they go to India, they will be back for American quality


our jobs will never go away...


there. I already put them in there so no one has to run their long posts saying the same thing that is always said...


Does the demographics fill in on your account or do you ....

have to type them in?  I had an account that filled in and it was not too bad.  The account I have now must be searched out from the patient name to the type of document.  Really sucks because it is so terrilby time consuming.  Get a ESL saying the name and you can be looking at several minutes just to locate it.


I don't think any of them do, but some of them require VERY little time to fill in.
.
NO demos to fill and a lot better than .0835!!!

I have great benefits, no demographics to fill in (unless error and maybe a MR# and name), and make in the double digits for my line count rate.  Any MT with a lot of years acute care experience that settles for less than 0.09 or 0.095 is crazy. These jobs are out there. 


I worked for Amphion a couple of years ago and I only stayed about 2 months due to the demographic issues.


Good Luck to all!!


Do you still have to fill out a timesheet with the keystrokes
s
Here is the reason that rad job is hard to fill...
Pay is by the report. As I am training, the woman training me states that I will be doing a lot of diagnostic studies, that the reason is they are dictated during those hours. So, I just imagined myself typing huge reports for a buck and a quarter with no benefits and figured she was warning me before I got in too deep. If that is the account which is in the Houston area.

Now, I guess I am glad it happened since the word lay offs sends us all into a state of panic and anxiety equivalent to fight or flight and is an exhausting state especially while trying to produce perfect work.
Can anyone fill me in on what type of work Amphion has?
Is it a lot of ESL, and if so how bad/good are the accounts they have?
Yeah, and do you have to fill out a bunch of demographics
and garbage without being paid for typing it all when it takes longer than typing the actual report?
Care to fill us in on the contents so we can hope for the best? nm
nm
You fill out a schedule a month at a time..sm
and you can change it at anytime.  You are not required to work weekends.  The work is pooled, they use ExText.  They are wonderful!
How long does it usually take to get started once you fill out paperwork for MDI-FL? sm.
I filled out my paperwork about a week ago and have not heard from anyone.  Does anyone know how long it usually takes to start with MDI-FL?  Or has anyone had any problems hearing back from there once they said You are hired?
Almost no demographics to fill in on my account. Sound

quality could be better though.   Platform is very easy, everyone is very nice, pay is better than most, IC position 10 cpl/11 cpl weekends.   Small company that is growing.  They DON'T offshore. 


On my Amphion acct I had to fill in demographics
I lasted a few months because it was a losing battle. I had to quit when my husband was out of work after a MVA. Its okay to supplement income if you are happy with minimum wage.
Just to fill you in, I applied with Keystrokes over a month
a position in which I am making between $17 and $18 an hour and am VERY VERY happy so I really do not need any of the BS offered by Keystrokes. I just wanted to ensure that everyone is aware of what games they play. I hope you continue to enjoy being employed there.
How do you cite sources but not fill in blanks?!
NM
yeah, seems it is hard to fill 2nd shift. nm
.
How do we fill out the forms requested via email when we don't

have printers suppled by TT with their computers.  Help, pls


Well, if she meant she doesn't want to fill in ANY blanks...
then she's gonna have trouble finding what she considers a decent QA job!
I received a questionairre to fill out and sent it back to them. I never heard anything after that.
I emailed in hopes of checking to see if they received my information, but never heard anything.  May not be meant to be for me
You fill out a time sheet. If you need to make a change sm
to your schedule, you just email them.  They seem pretty flexible about everything.

Hope this helps.


Try TransTech. I know that they are really flexible for hard to fill slots.
x
it means they have a lot of data field fill-in; nonproductive wrk
nm
How many companies do not require you to fill out a time clock? NM
Thanks.
Does DQS track your time for payroll, or do we fill in our own timesheet on-line? nm
nm
I think they will hire PT if it is a hard to fill time slot. I would talk
to them and see. They go both by hours worked and lines transcribed since you are employee status. The insurance is First Health and the coverage is great. We had Aetna prior to this and First Health offers better coverage for less money. Vacation accrues immediately but you cant' take it for the first 90 days. I think you get 11 days the first year and it increases every year after that. I think the max is either 21 or 26 days per year.

Hope that helps.