Preface
There may arise a few questions in your mind if you are new to medical transcription. How much does medical transcription pay? What would be a medical transcriptionist’s salary? How many lines can a medical transcriptionist type? What could a medical transcriptionist earn working from home?
However, you may come across a lot of vague answers for these questions on a medical transcriptionist’s salary on the internet. You should ask this question to someone who is really into this field to answer all your queries patiently about medical transcription income. It is simple mathematics. Come let’s work out those numbers on medical transcription pay package. There is no hard and fast rule to arrive and remain consistent in those numbers.
Factors that affect productivity
There are several factors that influence the answer to these questions. I list a few of them below:
- In particular, the typing speed of the transcriptionist.
- Experience of the transcriptionist.
- Listening comprehension skills of the transcriptionist.
- Word expanders used.
- Type of reports involved, for eg., operative reports, history and physical, discharge summaries, clinic notes, etc.
- The number of standard copy/paste reports involved.
- Accessibility to reference materials.
- Frequency of accessing reference materials.
- Work atmosphere and surrounding disturbances/distractions if any.
- Clarity of the audio.
- The accent of the doctor.
- Repetitive nature of the reports.
- The overall mood of the transcriptionist.
- Speed of the computer, server, network/internet.
- And a few more, that I might have missed!
The chosen medical faculty
Moreover, the take-home pay of a medical transcriptionist will depend upon the faculty that s/he is working. For example, take my case. I am very much interested in human anatomy (read about me). So I chose radiology which requires minimal hunt for reference. In fact, this faculty will have a lot of negative or normal reports. So I have to just copy/paste standard formats. Whereas, this is not the case with outpatient consultation notes, history and physical, discharge summaries, or operative reports.
I’m into this field for almost 10 years now. On an average day, I pick up and type about 100 to 150 reports or 60 to 80 minutes of dictation to keep me occupied for about 6 to 8 hours a day. Assume a report has 10 lines roughly. Hence it equates to around 1000 to 1500 lines a day. Thus on average, an MT can churn out around 15 to 20 reports of 10 lines each an hour or 150 to 200 lines an hour. Equating that to 8 hours comes around 1200 to 1600 lines a day. This is a usual day’s chore. I have even at times produced 4000+ lines a day, for months, due to the easy nature of the work involved.
Bottom line
So nothing is static. The more you’re involved, the more you produce and the more you earn. A standard line is considered as 64 keystrokes or 64 characters including spaces. To my knowledge, the rates vary from 7 cents to 14 cents per line. Though the higher pay per line is becoming a distant dream nowadays. Correlate these numbers to pay per line or pay per report. Thus you get those numbers a transcriptionist can earn, provided you are able to get a contract directly from a doctor, hospital, clinic or lab in his locality and return the work directly to the desk of the doctor without any intermediaries.
Whereas in the setup of a medical transcription company, the situation is entirely different. There you have editors, proofreaders, moderators, quality controllers, team leaders, accountants, clerks, administrators, etc. So the overheads are more. The earnings of a first-level medical transcriptionist are diluted by the expenses paid to these hierarchic cadres. Therefore, a contract procured from a transcription company by a transcriptionist will yield only low pay.