Change

Change, that word we all love to hate, right? When you think about the world of medical transcription, you realize it has always been about change. For me, I think that’s part of what attracted me to the profession. Medicine changes every single day and there is always something new to learn. That makes it exciting. I love it when my mind is engaged and things are challenging.

We also have access to a world of electronic references. What a change this is. And still, some of us will hang tight to our books and want them on our bookshelf within easy reach no matter what. Others will use all electronic references and wonder how anyone could possibly want to haul books out all the time. And then some will be a hybrid of both worlds. I think that’s where I am these days. I still love my books, however, I do use electronic references and find them to be quite convenient.

It’s not just medicine that changes in our profession. The technology changes all the time as well. When I started doing medical transcription, we worked on typewriters (yes, I know that’s a foreign concept to some of you!). Who will ever forget the days of “white out” and colored “white out” and liquid paper? We also typed those reports with carbon paper so that we had all of the copies we needed. At one place, each copy was a different color. That meant you had three or four bottles of colored liquid paper on your desk so that when you made a mistake, you could correct each one, in the right color! I remember the first time I met someone who had never done medical transcription on a typewriter; she had only used a computer. It made me feel like I’d been around a VERY long time. Then I went to an AHDI (then AAMT) meeting and met an MT who told me stories about her early days of transcribing. She would go into the operating room with the surgeon, sit on a stool at the side of the room, and take his dictation in shorthand as he did surgery. She then went back to her desk and transcribed her shorthand notes. Can you imagine? And yet, there IS a move now in the healthcare world to have “scribes” so perhaps we are returning to that at some point in the future. My eye doctor has had a scribe for a long time. She comes into the room with him and as he does my eye exam, she writes the note in the chart. With the technology available today, the scribe could just as easily put that information directly into the electronic record. Perhaps a future role for MTs?

Perhaps the biggest change of late is speech recognition technology (SRT). I first heard that term perhaps 15 years ago, and the mantra was “try this technology and it will replace your MTs and save you money!” Now I believe the vendors have gotten a bit smarter and many actually realize the value of having an MT edit the SRT document on the back end. Physicians simply do not want to take the time, for the most part, to edit their own work. I actually love the idea of our future being connected to this technology. Why? As some of you have seen in your own work environments, it often means that the MT pay is less per line, with the idea being you can produce more lines this way since you don’t have to type everything from scratch. Yet, many of us know, those SRT documents sometimes would go faster if we just redid them from scratch! So why do I think it’s such a great thing? I believe it is beginning to place the emphasis on our knowledge, and not only on how fast we can type. And that, in my opinion, is a good thing. When we can impact the healthcare world so that medical transcriptionists are seen as knowledge workers and not clerical support, we have a chance of really making a difference for our profession. The topic of compensation is probably one for another blog article, but I do have some thoughts on that one as well.

This week, the HITECH Act compliance date is upon us. By now, you should have heard from your employer with what that means to you and your work world. If you have a medical transcription service, then you are sure aware of how much change this is for our industry and what a scramble it has been for everyone to get ready in time.

Sometimes I think we, as MTs, shoot ourselves in the foot trying to resist the changes in our profession. I was sure that way with my first computer. I hated the idea of having to learn something new because it would slow me down. Now I cannot imagine not having one to work with and stay connected! The better way would be to simply embrace the changes and figure out how to make them work for you! Do something no one else is doing and be a linchpin in your work! (You can read my post about being a linchpin here on my leadership blog.

What are you doing to embrace change in our world today? What changes have I left out? Let’s hear from you!