Research Medical Transcription

May 14, 2010

Over the past month, I’ve been researching Medical Transcription. I’ve looked at schools and curriculums, information related to the future of MT, wages, companies that hire, starting a transcription company, and the list of research about medical transcription goes on. I’ve also spent a lot of this time period finding typing sites online that work on increasing typing speed and accuracy.

In my travels around the medical transcription community, I’ve looked at many sites with news, blogs, reports from AHDI and other associations, and many reports regarding medical transcription. Because a medical transcriptionist is paid by production it made sense to me to increase my typing speed and accuracy. I searched sites that used games, practice, and stories as well as the alphabet soup sites that work individual letters and groups of letters over and over. I finally found a way to work both research and practice at the same time.

For the past week I have spent a majority of my time at keybr.com. It’s an interesting and basic little program that allows the user to practice typing letters that are commonly used together in the English language, but it also has an area where you can ‘cut and paste’ words, letters, or whole pages of articles for typing practice. My thought was; if I need to learn as much as I can about medical transcription and I need to practice copiously in order to improve typing speed; why not combine the two?

Of course, just thinking of this made me feel efficient and effective. Wow, those words are lovely together, aren’t they? Efficient and Effective. I know I’ve read a series of books by Anne McAffrey that used this combination of words often in relation to a character who was the backbone of inventing and engineering and even reverse engineering equipment and services to support their world. I loved the way they went together in the books and I love how they work for what I’m trying to do.

In the course of a week, I’ve read and typed numerous articles about transcribing and transcribers, companies and how they work for the betterment of the industry and just funny little stories about various things that happen during the process of a transcriber’s day.

I feel grateful that my idea of putting the learning process and typing practice together has been as effective for me as it’s been. I started typing at the “alphabet soup” sites several weeks ago and improved my typing speed by 5 words per minute. In the last week, I’ve increased close to 15 words per minute. I’m happy with my progress.

Even though I know that it’s impossible to have a magical increase in typing speed, I’m consistently (daily) improving by anywhere from 2-5 words average for the day. With each increase my accuracy plummets, but a little more conscientiousness on my part and that quickly disappears without reducing the speed by more than 1 or 2 words per minute.