After making the decision to put my fingers to the task, I try to make sure my desk is cleared off and set up to be most efficient for me. I have my coffee or soda, my hardcopy references like my medical dictionary, English dictionary, thesaurus, Pill Book, Gray's Anatomy, Stedman's books, notebook, binder, pen, and phone on top of my desk. I also have my reading glasses for that stupid tiny print they use in most of these books. I'm thankful every day for Ctr + and - to adjust the size of the letters on my screen. I love reading. I don't love glasses. Go figure.
With BenchmarkKB, Career Step, and Gmail tabs open and Shorthand primed and ready, with my trusty noise-canceling headphones I am ready to listen to dictations. Or am I? Nope. I have 2 browsers open at all times. I may never need the second one, but sometimes I need to open the same page in different browsers for research. Many times I have Career Step open in the second browser so I can research the information in the course. I often use my own saved copies of previous reports in Word to research as well. Like when I can't for the life of me remember how to format an Ophthalmology report. Please save me from that beasty!
I usually use a modified 3 pass method for transcribing, just like what they tell you to do in the Transcription Consultation. First pass is for listening and transcribing what I hear easily. I generally need to change the speed of the dictation because I just don't type fast enough straight, and I'm not good enough to keep up (yet) with Shorthand. If there's a word I know but can't seem to spell, I plug it into Benchmark, Google, or The Free Dictionary. Usually that's enough to find what I'm looking for and type it correctly in it's place.
The Second pass is for plugging the holes. Usually it's a medication, dosage, laboratory value, and (thank you doctor mumble/speed talker) vital signs. It would be so much nicer if the numbers that actually affect patient care were clearly spoken. Don't you think? This is also when I listen over and over to those hard to hear sections of bad audio, cut off words, slang, abbreviations, diagnoses or tests that doctors also like to mangle into unrecognizable mush. I take this time to proofread the document and see if there's anything else that I can fix. Then I hit submit.
I add up my errors and put that into the points to deduct. When it tells me what percentage I scored, I take the whole report from the report number to the last of the footnotes and put it into a new Word document.
The Third pass is for retyping the report while listening to the dictation and keeping an eyeball on the comparison over there on my open Word document. How pretty it looks sitting over there with all those patriotic colors! So distracting. My new report looks good. I've proofread it for typos, run the spellchecker, and bravely hit the submit button again. If it's a clean report, I input 0 points to deduct and copy and paste the whole thing to my Word document again. With the lovely little 100% showing that I've put in the time, effort, research, and work to make the best report I could.
I save the whole thing, both versions of my report, under the report number, the module, type and specialty. You might be wondering why I don't just keep the finished report and get rid of the first one. Because I NEED to see where I had problems in the report. I can't see what I need to work on if I don't have the comparison report with the colors.
I love the searchability of Word. When I need to look up a type of report I can find it. If I have a doctor that is just beating my brain, I can search for other report numbers closest to the one I'm working on. Nine times out of 10 I'll find a report by the same doctor and can look at what he did with the last one.
I think the biggest problem that students have is panicking when the first submission comes back and they've missed things they think were right, or the comparison shows a style difference they didn't think was there. I've developed a little bit of a Zen attitude toward the comparison. I've done everything I possibly can to get a good report. Is there an error? Maybe. Is there a style difference? Probably. Am I learning from it? ABSOLUTELY!
Should I feel defeated because I don't know everything about this report, dictator, or specialty? No. Should I feel like I will never "get it" just because I didn't this time? No. I'm still learning. Mistakes, Homer-like D'oh! moments, and style issues don't have the power to overwhelm me. I take a break. Go play around, ruffle the dogs, do the dishes, visit the forum, and come back ready to tackle the next challenge.
If life was that simple and straight forward, I'd have it made!
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