Video Recording for Transcription - It May Not be Worthwhile

If you're planning to make a video recording for transcription, whether digital or analogue, the first thing you need to consider is the reason for recording video rather than audio. If you have other reasons for wanting video - for instance to record the body language in a training session or meeting, or because you're recording TV or film footage, then you may want to consider transferring to audio before sending to your transcriptionist. I'm not aware of any transcription machines that will play back video footage, and there is significant time involved in transferring video to audio tape in order to transcribe it. If you are recording video in a meeting or focus group, in order that the transcriptionist can better identify speakers, then you need to carefully consider how best to set up the cameras or the effort may go entirely to waste. You also need to consider your location and that of your transcriber - for instance as we are based in the UK we only accept videos in European format (PAL) rather than NTSC as used in America.


If you have recorded video in order to help the transcriptionist identify speakers, the transcription has to be carried out first from the audio tape, and then read through while watching the video tape to check that speakers have been correctly identified. As the video does not have transcription-style playback controls this is again time-consuming.

If you have a video made of a focus group, meeting or round table discussion for instance, please remember to provide us with a seating plan so that we can actually identify the different speakers from their positions in the room. This may not always be 100% effective, as it depends on the positioning of the camera, but it will help. A client once sent us a video and said 'Oh you won't need a seating plan; everyone has a name card in front of them.' However, the video camera was situated in the corner of the room and looked over the shoulders of six of the twelve participants, meaning that their bodies entirely blocked the view of the place markers. It also meant that we couldn't tell with 100% certainty who was speaking as we could only see the backs of half the participants!

It is important to understand that it takes around four hours to transcribe one hour of clear, good-quality one-to-one interview from audio tape, and it can take much longer if the quality is poor in any way. The additional time taken to record the audio from the video and then check back will probably be in the region of 1 to 2 hours per hour of video recording. So an hour of analogue video recording may take from five to seven plus hours for an interview and substantially more for a group session.

Other factors that increase the time taken, such as strong accents, background noise or a need for verbatim transcription (please see the information on our website about the differences between verbatim, intelligent verbatim and edited transcription) will also increase the time taken to transcribe.

Digital recording is becoming more affordable all the time and it has many advantages over analogue recordings, so if you are making analogue recordings consider switching to digital. Digital video has many of the same issues as analogue video but you will at least have a better quality recording in almost all cases! It may also be practical to make a video (analogue or digital) for your purposes e.g. examining body language, but make a digital audio recording at the same time for your transcriptionist. Although you will then need to check through to ensure voices have been identified correctly, the cost of transcription will be considerably less than if the transcriptionist has to convert the recordings to audio and then check back using the video.

About the Author
Anne Hickley has many years experience in a wide variety of administrative posts. Roles have included provision of secretarial services, PA work, project management and administration, academic and business report writing and editing, and recruitment. She runs Penguin Office Services (http://www.penguinofficeservices.co.uk)and Penguin Transcription (http://www.penguin-transcription.co.uk)

10 Effective Tips For Promoting Your Medical Transcription Business

Looking to build your existing MT business or just starting out? These marketing tips will give you some good ideas for finding new clients.

Promotion Letter – A very effective way of landing accounts. Send out a promotion letter to all your local medical offices describing your services. And follow it up a few days later with a personal phone call.

Freebies and Giveaways – Give away a certain amount of services for free, such as a free sample transcript or a discount for a certain amount of work. Tell clients about your giveaways in all your advertising material.

Flyers – Flyers are great for marketing a medical transcription business. Distribute them to doctor’s offices, hospitals, clinics, social workers or any other targeted customers.

Business Cards – Carry them with you wherever you go and give them out as necessary. Use proper business card etiquette. Always ask for a business card in return and don’t just stick the card in your purse or wallet. Glance at it a few seconds to show the person you are interested in them.

Magnetic Signs – Place a magnetic sign or bumper sticker on your car. Make it short but effective so people will remember you. Include your website address and/or contact details on it. Remember it will be easier for people to remember a catchy .com website address than a phone number. Not everyone will have pen and paper handy.

Pens or Other Tokens – Pens, mouse pads, mugs, t-shirts or other small tokens with your business name and details on them is an inexpensive and effective marketing tactic. Pens, mouse pads and mugs work especially well in the MT field. Your business name will be displayed in busy medical offices and hospitals for potential clients to see.

Charitable Acts – Support a local charity in return for exposure. Choose a medical related charity for targeted exposure, such as cancer awareness or heart charities. You’ll raise funds for needy charities and feel good about yourself in the process.

Ask for Referrals – Don’t be shy about asking for referrals from current clients. If you’ve provided a good service for them, they will be happy to spread the word about you in return. Ask if they would please pass out some business cards to their colleagues for you.

Network, Network, Network – Find other local MTs and network with them. The key to network is not to go out with a “what’s in it for me” mentality. Genuinely make friends and help others wherever you can and people will do the same for you in return.

The Phone Power Hour – Set aside an hour every day or every few days of uninterrupted time and make this your phone power hour. Pull up a list of local potential customers and start calling them. If you’re a bit nervous at first, write down what you would like to say. Follow up with potential customers you’ve sent letters to or potential marketing partners. Use this hour to expand your networking opportunities as well.

That’s it, 10 easy, affordable and effective ways to start spreading the word about your MT business. With a little practice you’ll be well on your way to finding new clients.

About the Author:
Mila Sidman is an experienced MT and owner of http://www.AskTheMT.com - an informative website dedicated to answering all your medical transcription questions.

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Finding Affordable Transcription

You may have been conducting research interviews, focus groups, market research, but whatever your reason for recording conversations you’ll be looking for an affordable transcription service. There are many transcription services available but sometimes an affordable transcription service can seem hard to find. Transcription is not cheap, because it is a lot more involved than copy typing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find an affordable transcription service, and by providing good quality recordings you can make the transcription more affordable, as it will take less time to complete.

You may have planned to do the transcription yourself, but if you are not a fast touch-typist and do not have specialist transcription equipment then you have probably now realised that it’s going to take you a very long time. I have had clients come to me saying it was taking them 20 hours to produce a transcript of a 1-hour recording. That’s why they ended up using a transcription service!

The most important thing to remember is that it’s just not possible to type as fast as you speak. Even an experienced transcriptionist will be able to average four times as long for a good, clear one-to-one interview – so an hour of recording will take an average of four hours to transcribe. A focus group may take six hours or more per hour of recording. (Industry standards obtained from the Industry Production Standards Guide (I998), published by OBC, Columbus, OH, USA) Transcriptionists also have to make sense of what’s being said, punctuate the speech correctly and use the right homophones (words like there/their/they’re that sound the same but are spelt differently.)

So how can you make sure that your transcript is clear, in order to get an affordable transcription price? Basically, the easier you make the transcription for the transcriptionist, the more likely they are to be able to give you an affordable transcription quote.

First of all, use the best recording equipment you can afford, and make sure it’s fit for purpose. This means that for interviews you should record with an external microphone rather than one built into the recorder, which is only designed to pick up one voice dictating. For focus groups you should have several microphones so that all participants are close to a mike.

If you’re conducting interviews then, if at all possible, conduct them in a quiet room, as background noise will dramatically increase the time taken to transcribe the recording, as the transcriptionist may have to listen to sections several times in order to capture the interview speech. It is helpful to spell out your interviewee’s name at the beginning of the tape, before starting the interview, and speak out any information you would like on the transcript header e.g. the date, the job title of your interviewee etc. You may also want to conduct a ‘debrief’ session at the end of the recording, when you are alone, in order to quickly record your impressions of the interview. For research interviews this is often part of the methodology.

Focus group transcription will cost more than a one-to-one interview transcript, but you can still get an affordable transcription service if you work to make your recording as clear as possible. Again make sure the recording is conducted in a private quiet room. Air conditioning can affect a recording, but so can opening a window, so if it’s a hot day it’s worth making a couple of test recordings before you start to see if there are problems! It’s really important to firmly chair a focus group too. Remind all the participants that all their views are valid, there are no rights and wrongs and, while you’re interested to see if they agree or disagree with each other, they should try not to talk (or shout!) over each other to make their point. Saying this at the beginning is important but it’s even more important, if you want affordable transcription, to remind participants each time things start getting a bit ‘out of hand’ that they need to speak separately for the sake of the recording. Finding the balance here between letting the talk flow and making sure you get a good recording is quite an art!

Conference recording is best left to the professionals if possible! Often these days a venue will provide recording facilities of good quality, included in the price. A microphone needs to be set up for the speaker and there should also be people in the audience with ‘roving’ microphones to take around to any audience members wanting to ask a question.

Digital recording systems provide the best quality and many transcriptionists only work with digital now, so if you want to give yourself the widest field then it’s certainly worth considering digital.

Any information you can provide to the transcriptionist about your recording will help, and may help toward an affordable transcription service. For example a list of key words will reduce the time spent ‘Googleing’, searching the internet to find out how to spell technical terms, names of organisations etc. If you can provide this info it certainly saves time, and saving time saves you money, again reaching toward that goal of an affordable transcription service. Technical work will always be more expensive than non-technical, but providing a ‘crib sheet’ of key words should reduce the cost.

Most transcriptionists work in a standard format, whether that be tabular, tabbed, interviews shown as initials or full names etc. Again most are happy to work to your specifications, but the standard format might well be cheaper, so think carefully about whether you need something different or not. Find out what the standard format is in advance if it concerns you, and you may be able to adapt it to your needs. If, for instance, it’s essential that you have speakers in different fonts or different colours, this will add to the price. It might be more cost-effective for you to put this in when the basic transcript is returned to you!

Finally, give some serious thought to whether or not you need a verbatim transcription. Verbatim transcription includes every repeated word, every ‘um’ and ‘erm’, all those ‘filler’ phrases like ‘you know’ and ‘know what I mean’ that may be repeated a hundred times in one interview, and can also include pauses, coughs, throat clearing etc. if required. Needless to say if this takes longer. If the transcriptionist can filter out all this stuff the transcript is quicker. In my company the cheapest level is what we call ‘intelligent verbatim’ which cuts out all these fillers but leaves the rest exactly as it’s spoken. Different transcriptionists work this differently though, so always check when you’re phoning for your quote. Here are some brief examples. Somewhat more expensive is edited, which corrects the grammar and any mispronounced words as well as knocking out all the fillers.

Verbatim

So, anyway, you know, I said …er, ‘Well, Susan, I really think you, you shouldn’t be um asking, er, me that.’ And she, erm, er, she, she, well, she said, ‘Look Mark, I dunno what you mean,’ know what I mean?

Intelligent Verbatim

So anyway I said, ‘Well, Susan, I really think you shouldn’t be asking me that.’ And she said, ‘Look Mark, I dunno what you mean.’

Edited

So I said, ‘Well, Susan, I really think you shouldn’t be asking me that.’ And she said, ‘Look Mark, I don’t know what you mean.’

You can see that a whole extra line of typing is required for the verbatim work in just those two sentences.

There are occasions when verbatim is required – depending on your topic it might be required for legal reasons, or you might be studying the language itself and the way it’s used. But if you really don’t need it, don’t end up paying for it!

There are many excellent reasons for interviewing groups of people, but don’t do this in order to try to reduce the transcription cost! As already stated, it takes much longer to transcribe a group of more than two or three people (including the moderator/interviewer) because of the time taken to distinguish the different voices and the fact that people will inevitably talk over each other, especially when they get excited, enthusiastic, impassioned or angry.

And finally, remember that the cheapest transcription quote might not be the most affordable one in the end. There is an oft-quoted phrase: if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Will it really be cost-effective to send your hard-won interviews to the cheapest service if what comes back is gobbledygook and you have to go through the whole thing correcting every other word? How much time will you then waste that could have been spent more productively on your core business?

Source: http://www.articlealley.com/

About Author : Anne Hickley has many years experience in a wide variety of administrative posts. Roles have included provision of secretarial Services, http://www.penguinofficeservices.co.uk/

The Use Of Pharmacology References In Medical Transcription

Drug reference books are an important resource in the library of a medical transcriptionist. In order to keep up to date on new drugs, a medical transcriptionist should purchase drug reference books every year or every other year.

Four important pharmacology references in the medical tanscriptionist's library are:

1. Physician's Desk Reference (PDR)
2. American Drug Index (ADI)
3. Saunders Pharmaceutical Word Book
4. Understanding Pharmacology

It is very important that a medical transcriptionist be familiar with drugs, their indications and dosages as well as how to research new or unusual drug names in drug reference books. Elderly people especially sometimes take multiple, as many as ten or more medications per day. A wise medical transcriptionist will be sure to stay up-to-date. Familiarity with drugs and drug reference books will make transcription assignments much easier and will increase the rate of productivity, which is important if the medical transcription is being paid by line of transcription.

The pharmaceutical companies use three different names to describe a drug, they are:

• The chemical name (which is a complicated formula describing the drug's molecular structure).
• The generic name (a shorter name assigned to the drug chemical)
• The trade or brand name (the copyrighted name selected by the pharmaceutical company)

The trade or brand name is easy to pronounce, and may indicate what the drug is used for or how often it is taken, and is selected for its appeal to prescribing physicians. A generic drug may have several trade names copyrighted by different manufacturers.

Rules to remember when transcribing drug names include:

• Generic drugs are always written in lowercase letters. Trade name drugs always start with a capital letter. Some trade name drugs will also have internal capitalization (such as pHisoHex). It is also important to note that the PDR contains only prescription drugs. There is a separate publication for nonprescription drugs. In addition, only drugs that the manufacturer pays to have listed in the PDR are included.

• Be alert to drug names that sound alike but their uses are completely different, such as Xanax used to treat anxiety and Zantac used to treat stomach ulcers.

• Words such as tablet, capsule, solution, elixir and cream are not part of the trade name of a drug and should not be capitalized for use

The standard drug reference is the Physicians' Desk Reference (published annually) and well known as the PDR. It contains various sections of drugs and is found in most physicians' offices. Sections of the PDR of most interest to the medical transcriptionist are:

•Yellow pages (list generic names of drugs)
•Pink pages (list brand names of drugs)
•Blue pages (list therapeutic category
•White pages (give a complete description of the listed drugs including indications and dosages)

The American Drug Index (ADI) is another standard drug reference book. This is a comprehensive reference that lists both generic and trade name drugs and prescription and nonprescription drugs in alphabetical order throughout the reference book. It lists every drug name in all capital letters. Generic drugs are preceded by a small black dot to denote their difference from trade and brand name drugs. Trade name drugs list the name of the manufacturer to alert the medical transcriptionist that the drug is to be capitalized.

The Saunders Pharmaceutical Word Book is a new drug reference book to be updated annually first published n 1992. It is an A to Z listing of medications with generic drugs in lowercase letters and trade names capitalized as the medical transcriptionist must type them. Each entry states briefly what the drug is for and the usual methods of administration. It has an appendix list of Sound Alikes, 879 pairs of drugs that sound enough alike to be confusing which serves as a special help to the medical transcriptionist.

Understanding Pharmacology is an easy-to-read textbook used in many pharmacology classes. Medical transcriptionists seeking a greater understanding of drugs and their uses may find it especially useful to include in their library as well.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/careers-articles/the-use-of-pharmacology-references-in-medical-transcription-188623.html

About the Author:
Connie Limon, Medical Transcriptionist. Visit us at http://www.aboutmedicaltranscription.info/ for more information about the unique and rewarding career choice of Medical Transcription. Visit Camelot Articles http://www.camelotarticles.com/ for a variety of FREE reprint articles for your newsletter, web sites or blogs.