Friday, February 27, 2009

Transcription Work May be What you are Looking for

Transcription is one area where work at home opportunities are fantastic. Many companies are now creating a large number of audio and video files from meetings, phone support calls, and other interactions. These files are difficult to study and analyze when they’re in multimedia form, and transcribing the conversations into text files allows the company to more easily keep records and analyze events. All these files, however, need to be written down first, though. While there are a few companies who do this, or have people in house to take care of it, a large part of the work is now being outsourced. This offers a fantastic opportunity for anyone looking for a great way to work from home and earn some extra income.

Getting involved can be extremely simple. Many companies that need to hire transcriptionists to work at home advertise online or on their website. Other companies act as portals for people looking to work from home as a transcriptionist. Usually, they will ask for writing or transcription samples to ensure you are qualified, and then begin regularly sending the recorded media to be copied down. The job is extremely simple, and is ideal for anyone looking for a good way to work at home. Listen to the recorded media, write down exactly what is said and format it a way that is easy to read. The transcriber doing the work from home can then check carefully for any words that may have been misheard or attributed to the wrong person, and send the complete work back to the company.

Of course, it isn’t always as simple as that. Some work requires a good deal of specialization which, if you are looking for an easy way to work from home, may not be something you have. Transcription that is extremely technical, in the legal or medical fields, or esoteric in another way, may be rather difficult to interpret for the layperson doing the work at home. However, for someone who has a background in that area, who perhaps works as a paralegal during the day, such problems shouldn’t be difficult. In fact, having that degree of skill, especially in a field typically filled with people who work from home may give you a leg up on the competition.

Technical sophistication and esoteric information may not be the only problem faced when doing transcription work from home. A far more likely scenario is being given a recording that is simply inaudible or impossible to decipher. For whatever reason, a microphone or recording malfunction, or even just a quiet speaker, some recordings may make it nearly impossible to transcribe. However, there are a few routes around even this. For short, hard to hear gaps, using the surrounding context is likely to give a clue to the meaning of the indecipherable portion. If only one word is difficult to hear, it can probably be inferred from the surrounding sentence, especially if it is a common one.

On the other hand, some recording faced when doing transcription work at home may be far larger. For longer and more intransigent gaps, it may be necessary to attempt to enhance the quality of the recording using common sound editing software. A few tricks may be necessary to remove static and other problems.

Overall, transcription can be an excellent way to earn a little money doing work from home. It may even be possible to solely rely on it, turning the work into a small business of sorts.

Source : http://www.articlesbase.com/

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Outsourcing: The Realities of Reorganization

The decision to outsource transcription should not be limited to cost-savings alone.

As health care organizations feel the affects of today's economic and political climate, it is even more important than ever to manage the specialized treatments and service offerings that provide the best value and yield. As these changes occur, there is a common theme: manage the variable costs associated with these services with the proper documentation and technologies to support them.

Health care providers will be juggling the regulatory requirements surrounding documentation with the facility's inherent need to reduce medical transcription costs. The increasing demand for medical transcription of patient care has been particularly notable over the past 10 years. This has allowed medical transcription service organizations (MTSOs) to provide higher levels of service with greater customer satisfaction. There are a number of reasons for the increasing demand for transcription: an aging population, the need for streamlined administrative tasks that provide for more time for patient care, perceived greater efficiency, ease and speed of dictating vs. other methodologies, reduction in qualified domestic MTs and of course the need to integrate documentation with the EHR. As we move into the future, there is an even bigger demand on administration to deliver high quality patient care and physician satisfaction while lowering the overall operational expenses of the organization. With the rising demand for medical transcription and technology comes the popular topic of total outsourcing.

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

Future of Medical Transcription

With the demand for quality medical transcription services rising, medical transcription (MT) outsourcing jobs seem to have a bright and secure future. Medical transcription is the most outsourced job in the healthcare industry and is provided with the aim of reducing both time and cost factors involved in the daily documenting of patient details. As the healthcare industry in the United States is closely associated with insurance firms, time-bound processing of patient records is essential for the smooth functioning of both healthcare and insurance firms.

Almost all US based healthcare facilities find medical transcription outsourcing to be highly beneficial and these services have now become an integral part of their daily functioning. By outsourcing these jobs, healthcare providers can concentrate more on providing better infrastructure and facilities for patients and have to worry less about hiring and training medical transcriptionists. With most transcription facilities functioning according to HIPAA regulations, all patient records remain secure, confident and safe.

To produce good quality patient records, most of these healthcare firms have employed highly skilled and experienced professionals in medical transcription, and their skills and knowledge play a key role in the success of these transcription firms. For new recruits, professional training is being given to achieve higher accuracy levels demanded by the industry. With the help of in-house language experts and proofreaders, most processed patient documents maintain high accuracy levels of up to 99%.

Now both established as well as new entrants in the healthcare industry including hospitals, clinics and private practitioners are aware of the benefits of medical transcription outsourcing and hence are moving towards these services. Most MT providers offer related services such as medical coding and medical billing for their healthcare clients.

India and Philippines are two emerging powers in the medical transcription field and are set to become the hub of future medical transcription jobs. The availability of a vast pool of graduates who are computer-literate and fluent in English and the turnaround time of 24 hrs for submitting assignments, are factors working in favor of the growth of medical transcription firms in these countries.

Right from its initial stages, the medical transcription industry has been undergoing revolutionary changes regarding the equipments and technologies used. From the initial typewriters and Dictaphone transcribers to high end computers, the medical transcription industry is always moving with the latest trends in technology. The quality in operations and the flexibility of the industry in adopting new technologies all ensure that the medical transcription community will have a long and bright future.

As a pioneer in medical transcription, we at Outsource Strategies International (OSI) are dedicated to providing the highest quality, HIPAA compliant online medical transcription services. We offer a comprehensive suite of medical billing and coding outsourcing services as well.

Source : http://www.articlesbase.com/

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Medical Transcription - Online Versus Classroom Training

If you've considered a career in medical transcription, you've probably already spent at least some time looking into the study options. And there are some serious decisions to be made when it comes to those training options. Should you study medical transcription in a classroom? Or would an online or correspondence course be better? It depends on your personality, your location and your needs.

Start by looking into schools in your area that offer medical transcription in a classroom setting. The sheer fact of your location in relation to any schools you'd be interested in attending may very well make the decision for you. While location is sometimes the deciding factor, don't let yourself be talked into taking what you consider to be second-rate medical transcription training just because it happens to be nearby. You can certainly get quality training from an online or correspondence school if there's nothing close to your location.

Your own personality - and limitations - should also play a role in your choice of training options. Do you work well without strict supervision and deadlines? Can you set goals for yourself and follow through? If your answer to those questions isn't a resounding "yes," you may not do well with online or correspondence training. There's a big difference between sitting in a classroom every day (or once a week) and being turned loose to do your own work. In a classroom, you're held responsible for keeping pace with the class. A correspondence class allows you to set your own pace. Some people simply need the structure of a classroom setting.

That's not to say that you have to attend classes in person to get that structure. Many distance learning programs allow students to "meet" with instructors and even classmates on a regular basis via computer. You simply set up a webcam at your location and you have the opportunity to interact with the teacher and even others taking the class. In some ways, this is the best of all possible worlds for the busy adult who still needs some structure to accomplish the goals of medical transcription training.

If you think the online "meeting" is a good idea for you, take a minute to look at your own computer and your connection. A dial-up connection with a slow computer may simply not be able to present the class in "real time." The lag can be annoying or even embarrassing, and you may find yourself losing out on some important points.

Regardless of what kind of training you choose, be wary of those offering claims that seem simply too good to be true. No one can guarantee that you'll find a job the week you complete your training and a school that offers those kinds of promises may very well be exaggerating other points of their training as well. Take time to be sure that any training facility you choose is reputable and that your hard work will end with training that will make you qualified to work in the medical transcription field.

About the Author:
Visit medical transcription online courses | medical transcription course or medical transcription school for info on Transcription.

Source : http://www.articlesnatch.com

Monday, February 9, 2009

Interview transcription - the importance of it

“Interview transcriptions authenticates the efforts of the interviewer and the interviewee, it documents the spoken words and accords it the status of a research paper to be consigned to posterity”

Recorded taped interviews and transcriptions are two sides of the same coin, many believe that a transcription is a back office task, but in actual it is an effective document of authenticity, in which every spoken word of the interview is documented in precise detail.

There are two forms of transcriptions of an Interview, one which is realistic where the pauses or repetitions are included and the other where it is not, meaning the irrelevant things are edited and corrections in grammar are effectively done.

Interviews may be between a celebrity and a moderator, a policeman and a criminal, an employer and an employee, a marketing team conducting surveys over the telephone; basically it is an interaction between two or more people.

And many people would be wondering, why would anyone require a transcript of an interview, since the audio of which is already available, consider this and review the importance of a transcript. There was a police officer who was in the process of filing criminal charges against a criminal, and based on the testimony of two key witnesses, the interrogation reached a stage where the criminal had no choice but to accept to the crime he had committed, and this confession of the accused was recorded, and to give authenticity to the confession, if a transcript or a text confession signed by the criminal was not made available to the court, the entire effort of the police officer in getting the conviction in the court will not materialize.

The other instance that also will need to be mentioned here, is of a student in the process of presenting research material on Oral History, the audio interviews based on his research was of 16 hours in length, and after editing the portions not relevant to the research a transcriber could format the transcript to seven pages only, and thanks to the transcriptions, it made reading them more interesting rather than listening to them for 16 hours.

The conclusion one can draw from these two instances is never make compromises on getting transcripts of the audio recordings, you never know how important they will matter at some stage.

A spoken word is not a sparrow. Once it flies out, you can't catch it.

Source : http://www.amazines.com/

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Medical Transcription sector to boom despite recession: report

Despite global economic downtrend, the Medical Transcription (MT) industry is looking for a further growth buoyed by a report of the NASSCOM stating that recession has not hit the healthcare industry.

Reverse is the trend in medical transcription outsourcing in the US, which is witnessing agonising attrition in large scale in IT, financial, manufacturing and other sectors.

As per a NASSCOM report, the MT industry will be worth Rs 40 billion by 2010 and could employ as many as 50,000 people. It predicts that this industry is here to stay for at least 10 years.

It estimated the size of the US MT industry, which is in the range of around $ 12 million in 2005, would reach $ 16.8 billion by 2010. The work offshored was expected to be in the region of $ 860 million in 2010, of which India is expected to capture $ 647 million. India remained a preferred offshore destination primarily due to availability of manpower and industry maturity.

The report also expected the employee strength of 18,000 in 2006 in India-based MT vendors would reach 52,000 by 2010. For an industry that witnessed too much crowding, too fast in India, a report conducted by US-based Stevens International Consulting expected the value of MT outsourcing in the US to double by 2005 to $ 4 billion. India could take as much as two-thirds of that increase, providing work to 45,000 transcribers.

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