Understanding the Medical Transcription Job Description
The medical transcription career is a rewarding career with job security in the health care field and it doesn’t require anything that might make you squeamish, like examining patients and handling samples. While some medical transcription career positions actually combine medical assisting with medical transcribing (mostly in smaller clinics), most medical transcription career openings will include the same basic responsibilities in the job description.
If you intend to have a medical transcription career, you should know that there’s more to the career than simply typing dictations. Most (but not all) employers offering the medical transcription career prefer that you complete an educational course and they look more favorably upon you if you have medical transcription career certification as well. This is because the medical transcription career involves several skills that you’ll learn from educational courses.
First off, the medical transcription career involves some knowledge of basic medical terms. You should be able to understand what the doctor, nurse, or researcher is talking about in order to accurately transcribe the document. You must also have skill in writing and be able to follow proper grammatical formatting in the medical transcription career. In some cases, you’ll even need to be able to edit what the person you’re transcribing says, in order to make the dictation more clear and accurate. In the medical transcription career, you must be able to judge when and if you need to make this kind of edit to the dictation.
The medical transcription career may be more versatile than you think. You can work in a general physician’s office, a hospital, a specialist’s office, a dental clinic, a psychology clinic, a medical research hospital, the medical examiner’s office, or a medical university, to name a few or even from home. Because of the nature of the work, the medical transcription career often allows for telecommuting because you can receive dictation files via the Internet.
The types of documents you’ll be transcribing in the medical transcription career differ depending on where you work and may include patient histories, the outline of an examination or procedure, the doctor’s advice, a research thesis, prescriptions for pharmacies, a medical examiner’s report and more.
The medical transcription career is a way to secure a valuable job in the health care field but doing so according to your schedule: full-time, part-time, regular hours or working from home. Training takes only one to two years.