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I worked in house in a doctor's office and it was the same for me...

Posted By: MtMommyof3 on 2008-12-08
In Reply to: Hourly was horrible for me. - After 19 years I am finally making what I am

and I had to answer phones, make copies, et cetera, basically was an MT/secretary...and I hated it...I am making much more money now working at home part-time...


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I work in-house for doctor's office now and Love My Job!
Good Luck.  I accepted an in-house position at a doctor's office after being laid off from a very large hospital. It is wonderful to be able to go and ask the doctor questions and get feedback directly from them.  It really is the way to go now instead of working for the really big transcription companies.  I feel like I am appreciated.
No, I've worked in doctor's business office.
That is what the insurance company allows, not what they dictate.  Who is to tell the doctor how long he can sit and talk with his patient.  It is up to him.  True insurance companies get together to decide what is the appropriate amount for the doctor to "charge" for a service but I've literally seen where the doctor sees the patient all of 2 minutes after patient is worked up by techs, but they still get paid for that visit.
I know a lot of people it helped (I worked in a doctor's office) SM
BUT you have to really want to quit before you start it. It doesn't make you want to quit - it just helps you w/ the depression and the withdrawal symptoms that come along w/ quitting. Good luck.
Doctor's office also in CT
I am also in CT in the Hartford area and I have not seen an MT job for ages. I used to work in a hospital for years in Hartford and saw a job on Career Builders.com. It has been there forever so not sure if it was ever filled.
Hopefully my doctor's office
hasn't sent anything there recently. Well maybe their place of employment will have to close and THEY will have to lose THEIR jobs. Karma sucks...
New doctor in the office
I picked up my work this morning from one of the four offices I type for (yes, some of us do still pick up work, I'm from ancient times, I know :).  The doctor hired another doctor to work in his office with him.  Don't you think it is not very nice not to let you know that?  I'm grateful, and can use the extra money, but surprise surprise!
New doctor in the office

I also pick up tapes from 3 offices. I like doing it this way. I would be very happy if another doctor joined one of my groups. I guess it's better than the other way around.


doctor's business office...
It depends on the office. I personally know of a large clinic in my hometown where the physicians are required to see a certain number of patients per day, bringing in a minimum amount of $$$$ based on office visit, labs, and other ancillary services they order for the patient.

Their doctors are under contract for 5 years; then after they make partner, they still have to adhere to the daily minimum requirement.
How to get a transcription job in a doctor's office. ??

In the past 3 years, I have never once seen an ad in the papers for a Transcriptionist to work in house (or at home for that matter) at a doctor's office.  For those of you that have those jobs, how did you get them?  Did you know someone at the office?  Maybe no one ever quits these jobs and that is why there are no postings?


Anyone just sit down with the phone book and start calling?  


Working in doctor's office

I have a small MTSO, two I/C's but last January started working in a clinic that used to me one of my clients -- but they put in electronic charts and after 4 years of pulling their hair out and late notes I now go in 2-3 days a week and one of my subs 2 days a week to do their notes.   It is as an employee and no where near what I get with my own accounts but gets me out and with other people.   Nice mixture.   Out here in Oregon we have several large clinics that only use in-house people.   Need to go to the medical offices located by hospitals.   They are out there but don't expect big bucks as you won't get them. 


 


Just got hired by doctor's office.
Yep, can you tell I'm happy! Was working for a large national who took over the transcription department at the hospital I used to work for.
You'd think a doctor's office would be more understanding - DUH!
Ever tried to do your transcription with bilateral ear infections?  Can't hear, running a fever, dizzy-can hardly sit upright, but still expected to do work that requires HEARING and sitting at a computer!  And, I can't win, because as soon as I get this work done (which is taking 2x as long), there are going to be so many mistakes I am going to get ragged about that as well! 
doctor office dictation
Does anyone out there know of any companies who do doctor office dictation instead of clinic work or acute care?  I am looking for work and I have 25+ years experience in doctor's office transcription in many fields, but all the ads I keep seeing are only offering acute care or clinic work.  All the clinic accounts I have checked into put you in a pool and you never get the same doctor twice, so you don't have a chance to get familiar with them or get your speed up when typing.  There has to be companies out there who have doctor office accounts that consist of just a few docs.  Any names come to mind?
Doctor office trans
Probably smaller companies is what you want to look for instead of large nationals.  Have you looked in your local newspaper?  How about approaching a few docs on your own?  I've done that before and did overflow for them. 
have a real office in this house but...
before we built this house 9 years ago, lived in a 700 square foot apartment. I had a little computer desk in the corner of the bedroom. My husband would sleep on the couch if I was working late at night. The phone cord for the modem would snake through from the kitchen under the carpet...glad those days are over...
Home Office vs In-House
What about transcription done in-house in an office or dept. where there is high traffic from MDs to janitors?

My dog watches me type and horror of all horrors, I usually have the dictation on speaker phone.


Don't you love these doctor's wives who have to be in the office
but we all know they're just keeping an eye on the checkbook they married. So pathetic.
Doctor's wives as office mangers
is such a bad idea!  All of the offices I have worked for have had the "wives" as OM's.  They act like every penny they pay comes out of their pockets!  Gawd, once one tried to get rid of me and go to some Indian company and her hubby Dr finally spoke up for himself and said "no way"!!
They did test first time at doctor's office.
x
I had a doctor that was having problems with the office manager ...sm
So he would be in the middle of dictating and would see her walk by and under his breath he called her a few choice words everytime he saw her. I emailed the lady and told her that enough was enough and until they could make friends I was off the account. It was only a few hundred lines a week and was ready to quit the account anyway, but their feud had gotten to be too much for me. ;o)
I'd suggest you look for a local doctor's office if you
want no ESL.   If you do acute care you're going to have ESLs. 
If I call the doctor's office and ask for results of an
MRI done on me, do they have to give me the results or do I have to just wait on the doctor to call me?
It was the same when I worked in-house

Slow at the beginning of the summer. After the Fourth of July, people started coming in for elective surgery and things like that and work picked up.


It used to be really slow at Christmas, but with high deductibles on most insurance policies, December was fast becoming the busiest month of the year when I left.


ask yourself what you did when you worked outside the house. NM
.
When I worked in-house

at several different hospitals, we would bring a problem dictator to the attention of the supervisor, who then would present it to the HIM manager.  Most of the time the problem dictators got better after a discussion with the manager.  If it costs the hospitals EXTRA money, believe me they will take corrective action.  Money talks!


Sometimes, there are very legitimate reasons for corrections, as we all know, and I don't think Frustrated was upset about the legitimate ones.   There is a lot more of this careless dictator crap going on at teaching hospitals, but at least they have an excuse, they are new to dictating and usually feel quite bad for making so many corrections.  If they realize this and make an effort to be more careful, I don't have a problem with them, but there's just no excuse for the long-time dictators who carelessly make the MTs jobs more difficult.


While a certain amount of addendums or mind changing does happen, an "abuser" should always be brought to the attention of management.  No one knows about these dictators unless an MT brings it to the attention of those in charge.  Frustrated has a right to complain!  I feel her pain!


I had a dictator (on an account at an MT service) who made 10 different corrections to her reports on a regular basis & I am not exaggerating.  I had been instructed to join them altogether (in a time-consuming fashion) and fed up finally, I flagged them ALL separately for QA.  The transcription manager gave me a hard time about it, but I fought back.  However, when I talked to QA, she told me I did the right thing and that the hospital was having a "discussion" with that particular dictator as there was NUMEROUS complaints.  Dictator cleaned up her act a bit after that & I didn't have much more trouble with her.


Whe I worked in house, we use to have sm
that problem all the time. HR would interview folks and let really GOOD folks go because they didn't know what they were doing. We werent' really interested in typing speed, we just wanted to know about their MT skills. They use to let some really good folks get away. Also where I worked, if HR said you couldn't hire them, I don't care how good they were or how much experience they had, we couldnt hire them.

It has been going on forever that the people in charge are not even MTs!

Where I work now, the supervisors, recruiters, etc are all MTs themselves, so we speak the same language! I think its like that on alot of other jobs, the bosses don't even know the jobs.

As far as referring a friend, everything has gone to computers and there is no "personal touch" anymore either! Very sad.
I prefer office by front of house
Since I am female and live alone, I want to see if any activity takes place. Everyone else on my street other than a retired gentlmen who is frail is gone for the work day. Mostly, I see people putting flyers on the door for carpet shampooing or Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't think I am considered hateful, just not friendly. It is okay, I have enough friends lol
I have not worked for a doctor yet who cares about BOS.
It is the transcription company owners who sell it not the doctors or facilities.  None of my docs want anything to do with the single space after a period.  They all still accept the 1-10 spelled out too, amoung other things.  They do not have the time to nitpic over stuff that the AAMT group is so fixated on.  They want to practice medicine and be given well transcribed, neat, correct documents and that is exactly what I do.  I say if you want to start your own...go for it!  Transcription companies will tell their Transcriptionist to do it their way anyway and someone out there might like your ideas better!
When I worked for a single doctor, I
kept them a year. With the MTSO I work for now as an IC, I have to keep them 30 days.
try starting with a doctor's office or small clinic.
x
I would not do it. Go with a free FTP site for use by you and the doctor's office access only.
All you need to do is create files or folders, for example by date, upload them to the FTP site, and the doc's office can in turn download them directly to their computer. This uses a secure password on both parties' end, and is much securer than emailing.
"close" your home office before you sell your house...sm

then you don't have to do anything with the tax depreciation, etc.


Yuppers. When I worked in-house in an ER, you
would NOT believe the stuff we saw. Hamsters were common, though gerbils were preferred due to their tail. At the doctor's loung in the ER, the docs kept a list of the top 10 most outrageous cases. They wouldn't go into detail - just post a list of top 10 weird things, no names, just 1. Hamster. 2. Harmonica. 3. Pea., etc. Hamsters/gerbils were always up there, and a baked potato wrapped in foil held the #1 slot for a long time. Mother and fiancee came in with the guy, and none offered a word of explanation or an ounce of embarassment. The guy just needed help with a baked potato. That stayed at #1 for a while til I left. I can only imagine what the list says now...
I worked in house for 2 years

and when I went on Maternity leave they set me up from home.  I started working for a national in January.  My other at home position went VR and they brought all the jobs back in house. I couldn't go back into the office as I have two little ones and the cost of daycare is outrageous.  What's the sense of working then?


Hi Janna..when I worked in-house SM

We got paid hourly plus incentive pay.  Anything over 1100 lines a day was paid an incentive rate of 5 cents per line (plus your normal hourly wage).


So, if I typed 2000 lines in an 8-hour shift I would make:


$16.50 x 8 hours = $132


900 lines (1100 to 2000 lines) x 0.05 cpl = $45


Total for the day = 132 + 45 = $177.


We had a maximum of $1000 a month that we were allowed to earn in incentive pay.


Hope this helps you!


Chickadee


When I worked in house and used Meditech sm
only the person with administrative access, the lead MT or the supervisor could do that. They had access to all functions in corrections, the MT did not. Could be different where you work.
It's a small doctor's office so I am doing it as a favor for a mutual friend....
Nice to do something different every now and then.


I started in the file room of a 6 doctor urology office....
The file room in any office is a nuclear dumping ground...any paper that nobody knows what to do with gets dumped there. Then and there I made up my mind that I was NOT going to be a file clerk for the rest of my life.

I actually started by filing part time and typing part time. When we got a new Peds Urologist in the office, fresh from a fellowship at Mayo, I was right there. We used tapes back then as that was in the early 1990's. As he could fill up a 2 sided tape with 8 hours of seeing patient's, the other girl in the office did not want any part of his work and left it for me. The rest, as they say, is history.

I had no professional training, just 2 semesters of medical terminology and a killer spelling ability.

After I had typed urology, I was then farmed out to our other offices and I learned GI/GU, family practice, sleep labs etc.

I now work for a major hospital on the west side of Michigan and still type for my Peds urologist. The only difference is that he now has his practice in AZ, not MI.

If you can find somebody willing to take a chance on you with no experience, jump on it with both feet. You will be glad you did.
If you don't have kids, have you considered working in-house at a doc office or the nearest big
s
"close" your home office before you sell your house and you will have no problem..nm
x
I've worked in-house and at home ....
I find that even when you're in-house, with the nature of the job, there's no time for chit-chat.  When I worked in-house we had production minimums and there was incentive to earn if you produced, so who has time to talk?  I'm with you.  I'm happy being here in my comfy clothing without all that aggravation.  Let is snow, I don't have to drive in it!
Never worked in my house RadGuy w/5 brothers

I still crack up at the time my dad came home from work to find my 2 eldest brothers room a shambles with clothes strewn all over the place.  Being a senior and junior in high school their clothes WERE prize possesions..until that day when they got pitched out the window into the backyard full of mud from all the spring rain. 


Now that one worked as they never ever let a pair of shorts even touch anything but their dirty clothes basket.  Now, I'm using the same standard on my boys and just the uncles telling that story keeps them in line


in-house great idea & worked
When I was working in-house our hospital imposed for $50 fine on the docs for EACH delinquent chart. You can bet that got them to dictate on time. I think more hospitals should follow that example. it is better for everyone involved but mostly for the patient, who has info on their chart needed for continuing care.
If you want to work at a local hospital or doctor's office, go to community college. Otherwise
if you want to work from home, for a national company, you need to take the course from either Andrews School or M-TEC. It does you no good to save money by taking the Penn Foster course, because most companies will NOT hire grads from that school, it is a poor course and does NOT prepare you sufficiently for MT work.
I sure wish I worked in your office!
We hardly ever get an update, we run out of work, we never get answers to our questions, raises are few and far between.... its definitely an office to office, management to management thing! I hope MQ management reads some of these posts and get ideas on how they could make their office better and happier!
Is $15 an hour a good hourly rate for an in-house office position?

nm


 


when I worked in house learning MT the first shifters were just like the mean folks here
x
Same situation here. When worked in-house or for physicians offices,

never as much as a single episode of no work available.  Much to my dismay, I have found out that MTing from home for a nation is so unpredictable, in so far as what your paycheck is going to be every week or 2.  They all say "there is plenty of work," which is probably factual.  However, the nationals are primarily interested in pleasing the client with their promised swift turn-around-times.  What they forget is that if it weren't for the MTs, there would be no turn-around-time whatsoever.  It's really very discouraging and quite unfair.  Most people try to adhere to their monthly budget, which is impossible when one never knows how much they are going to make from one week to the next. We ARE the providers, not peeons, and resent being treated as such.   


 


And I disagree with that. I've worked home and in-house,
Everyone is different and some people don't rely on jobs to provide social interaction. When it comes to my job, I prefer being at home working independently without a lot of interruptions and enjoy the freedom of working from home. If I were stuck in an office with rigid hours, then I'd be resentful. Personally, I loathe being stuck in an office full of catty backstabbers and love the solitude of home. When I want to socialize, I call one of my friends.

You also have to be able to let QA remarks roll off your back a little, but that only works if you don't have the threat of being docked or terminated as a result of those QA remarks. Find an MTSO that doesn't hold those things over your head (yes, they do exist).

I do think the key IS where you work, but not home versus office - it's finding a company that values MTs, not sees them as mere production machines. They are few and far between, but they're out there. I lived through my share of bad apples in this biz before finding the good ones, so I speak from experience.
I worked at one job where the office manager would
go to the gas station on Friday afternoons to buy a case of beer for the employees.  It was his version of "corporate culture".  As the only female working there, it wasn't a great place to work anyways.  The guys told me that the only reason I got hired was because I looked good in a skirt and the office manager was going through a divorce.  My resume spoke for itself, but the comments, which got harsher after a few beers, did create a hostile work environment.
Because think of the reverse, when you worked in the office...
did you ever see the director of med rec ask doctors to dictate their old stuff, so there would be enough work for MTs? when we were low on work in the hospital,a deficiency list would be sent out, and then boom a bunch of dictation...

hospitals are doing anything and everything they can to cut costs, even as mentioned above, hiring ICs on the side. health care is purely a business now, and I would bet not a day goes by every hospital in America asks the question, how can we cut back on the cost of dictation?

if that were not true, you would not have the HUGE push for the technology and the HUGE push for outsourcing, overseas or not.

think about this, also. we are only working at home for these companies, because hospitals decided it would be cheaper than paying health benefits for full-time MTs, office space, etc etc.

I do not put anything past people who are 100% money-driven these days.

you do make a great point, though, about the billing and DRGs, etc., but I still think they are told to 'cool-it' whenever they can...