How to Improve Typing Speed and Productivity of Transcriptionists

So you have chosen medical transcription as your career accidentally or willfully. You are concentrating on churning out more and more lines day by day. You want to improve your productivity. Inch by inch, it’s a cinch. Here are some tips and tricks that I tried and employed as I started from around 200 lines a day. I peaked out around 4500 lines a day. Maybe these tips can be useful for you too.

Control/employ these factors that are directly related to your work:

Have a nice ambience

1. If you are working as a home transcriptionist, try to seclude yourself to a room with less disturbance and distractions.
2. Keep the workplace clean and fresh with some flower vase/greenery in front of you. A clean surrounding brings an overall fresh mood. I have even cleared off my desktop so that only three-four shortcut icons are there.

Keep everything handy

1. Keep all that you need for transcription or those that may intercept you during transcription within your reach. Maybe it’s your phone, wearing glass or books for referring. Keeping a bottle of water near your work station can avoid multiple walks to the cooler for drinking water.

Be ready

1. Install soft copies of Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Stedman’s Electronic Medical Dictionary, and Quick Look Drug Series. With these, you can refer and clear doubts within a few seconds with just a few keystrokes or clicks. Install Spellex, Stedman’s Medical Spellchecker, or our free medical spell checker to your word processor. It helps in quick identification and rectification of spelling mistakes.
2. Ultimately, Google can fetch information on anything. Hence set Google as your homepage.
3. One of the key points is to lessen the use of the mouse and increase the use of the keyboard. Hence take a printout of the shortcuts and stick it above your computer monitor.

Keep everything fully conditional

1. Use word expanders. There are numerous free text expanders as well as paid ones like Instant Text, FlashType, SpeedType, As-U-Type, etc. Alternatively, you may go with macros or AutoText feature available in MS Word, or Quick Correct in Word Perfect whichever you are comfortable with. Feed those standard sentences into your word expanders to retrieve them easily with just a few keystrokes.
2. Prefer mechanical keyboard over the membrane keyboard.
3. Perform routine computer maintenance to avoid unnecessary hiccups, breakdowns, and tension in between work.

Practice

1. If you’re not getting a word on the first go, leave a blank. Don’t get stuck and panicked with blanks. Try blank filling tips and techniques.
2. Practice makes a man perfect. Practice tough dictators. If you are a beginner, practice typing whenever possible.
3. Set targets like ten minutes of dictation to be transcribed an hour and work on it.

Stay healthy

The following factors are not directly related to your work but can greatly influence your performance.

1. A healthy mind resides in a healthy body. Have some rest. Sleep at least eight hours a day.
2. Take short breaks; say five minutes every hour. You could utilize this time to walk to the cooler to have a gulp of water. Stare outside to focus on a long object. This is a mild exercise to your eyes to lessen the possibilities of computer vision syndrome. Walk up to the toilet relieve the tension!

Miscellaneous

1. If you have access to your doctor, who is a bit on the tougher side speaking into the microphone, you can encourage him going through tips for dictating physicians. Enlighten him on the necessity of producing quality documents.

I’m back to 1500 lines a day. I started feeling a sort of boredom with my routines when I reached those 4500 lines a day. Now I have time to spend with my family, time for my hobbies, time to socialize; after all, just money can’t bring happiness in your life!

Did I miss anything to improve typing speed and productivity? Do you have to say something about better transcription production? Share your experiences, tips or tricks too through the comments form.