Imagine
you’re an ill American patient. (Ok, imagine someone you don’t like –
hereinafter referred to as ‘you’ – is an ill American patient.) You walk into a
clinic/hospital, have your problem addressed, and leave (hopefully, not
horizontally). You give no thought to who writes your report, what it contains,
where it’s stored, how many people will look at it. You’re the patient,
remember? You have enough troubles of your own. In the well-regulated American
healthcare industry, you’re a crucial player. Your job is to fall sick and
either stay sick or get well enough to fall sick all over again with great
gusto. If you can’t fall sick, you can do other clever things like sawing off
your thumb, getting shot in a drive-by shooting (formerly a crime, now a
sport), dropping something heavy on your foot, dislocating your shoulder in a
skiing accident…America
We’ve
all heard how big the American healthcare industry is (12 billion US dollars at
last count). Apart from you, the industry comprises medical facilities,
doctors, non-doctor healthcare professionals, rehab facilities, pharmacies,
insurance companies, and laws to govern everyone and everything. But you, dear
sick patient, and all your fellow players, will collapse like a house of cards
without me because I am the medical transcriptionist. I prepare your medical
records and in that short time when I’m doing it, your life quite literally is
in my hands. An accurate patient medical record is the link that connects all
the dots in the healthcare industry and if there are only six degrees of
separation, I’m the healthcare industry’s right arm.
As
professions go, medical transcription must rank as one of the most intelligent
and most demanding; it requires a wide range of premium skills such as research
and logic/reasoning abilities, command over the English language, matchless
typing skills, listening skills, medical knowledge in the areas of human
anatomy, disease conditions, diagnostics, treatment, and pharmacology, and most
of all a focused attention span of no less than a minimum of 7 hours – a
minute’s distraction can literally prove fatal to a patient a continent away.
Above all, it requires a commitment to lifelong learning. Transcriptionists not
only must know almost as much medical language as a doctor, we must also be
able to interpret the language of medicine accurately. We should be able to
tell, for example, whether the patient needs a pill, a procedure, or a pastor
by looking at his BNP. To prepare an accurate medical record and return it to
its owner within its deadline, transcriptionists must synchronize all these
skills perfectly every single minute on the job.
But
despite our skills and technological advances, we still rely on a human voice
talking to us from 10,000 miles away, to create a patient record – this is a
transcriptionist’s greatest challenge. Though we’re service providers for the
American healthcare industry, we actually service a global community of doctors
who speak English in their own native tongues. Doctors not only come in
different accents, they come in different moods, with varied dictation styles,
dictating from you don’t want to know where. After a long tiring day spent
listening to other people’s miseries, physicians are not exactly thrilled to
dictate them into a recorder; they fumble, yawn, rasp, growl, whisper and
sleepwalk their way through reports; regardless of how chaotic their dictations
are, what they expect to sign is a well-researched, well-punctuated,
grammatically sound medical document – a document that will be referred by
their colleagues, filed for insurance claims, quoted by medical personnel,
relied on by pharmacies, and hopefully never picked up by a lawyer.
Most times, we take our challenges in our stride and our skills for granted. The nature of our trade demands that we strive for perfection every single minute on the job, and we rise to the occasion more often than not. As medical transcriptionists, we’re acutely aware that our reports are not just about lines and deadlines – they are human stories, most of which are unfortunate and deeply disturbing. When we return quality work to our clients, we’re actually respecting the dignity of a faceless, sick patient. Sometimes, we forget what a vital role we play in patient healthcare and treatment planning and how much doctors depend on us to do their jobs well. What it takes to deliver a 99% accurate report is 110% of ourselves - that's what we bring to our profession every day. That's something we can be very proud of.
