Medical Transcription: Want to Increase Your Earning Power?

Last week I told you about a webinar series that I was helping to coordinate through AHDI. Tuesday night was the kick off session and I must say I had a great time with it, poking the box about our future with the 87 MTs who showed up. I do love those kind of sessions where a group comes together and brainstorms ideas. It just energizes me.

Next week, the session will be titled “Boosting Your Paycheck with Expanders,” and Laura Bryan is the speaker. Laura’s well known in our industry for her work in writing books on using Microsoft Word as well as the great book she did about technology for MTs. This topic is one we all need as we work to figure out how to use the tools we have to increase our productivity, which of course for most MTs means boosting that earning power. I asked Laura to write something for me to share with you about her session, and here it is:

Using text expanders is a terrific way to increase your productivity and your accuracy. But using text expansion is a “translation” skill—you have to be able to hear one thing and very quickly translate what you hear into your short form. It’s important to devise a method of recall that works for you so that you are not distracted by the time it takes to translate what you hear into your short form. Every mental distraction is an opportunity for an error or time lost by backtracking and listening again.

Basic use of a text expander is pretty simple and straightforward; most MTs choose the first letter of each word in the phrase (eg, CHF for congestive heart disease). But the more you use text expanders, the more obstacles you will encounter. The most common challenges are recall and duplicates (eg, CVA is used for cerebrovascular accident and costovertebral angle). In this webinar, we will explore methods for creating short forms that avoid conflicts and duplicates. In addition to expanding long words, phrases, paragraphs and report layouts, text expanders can also help with items that are awkward to key, such as terms with internal punctuation, phrases that include both numbers and letters, or terms written with mixed case. And then there are always those terms that present a personal challenge—spelling, capitalization or habitual typos—we all have them. Text expanders can be a terrific tool for overcoming those “brain blocks” and “fingering oops” that we all have. I hope you will join us as we “poke the box” on ways to use text expansion software to our best advantage.

What I would tell you about Laura is this. I’ve been an MT for a long time. I have never sat in one of her presentations where I didn’t learn something, even after all of my years. One of the first times I remember hearing her speak was when I first really understood the concept of clinical document architecture for clinical document types (what we then called CDA for CDT). All of a sudden it was crystal clear to me. She’s a great teacher and you won’t want to miss it.

Win a Registration

With each of these webinars in the series, I’m giving one away here at MT Tools Online. Laura’s will be the first giveaway. The session is next Thursday, October 6, at 3 p.m. Pacific time (4 Mountain, 5 Central, 6 Eastern). You can be eligible for this drawing by doing two things: Leave a comment here in the comment section about why you’d like to attend. The second thing is to use the share bar on the left side of this post to share it on your Twitter or Facebook profile so others will know about it. If you don’t have one of those accounts, you can email the link for this post to other MTs you know. You’re on your honor for the sharing part of this; I just know this community and believe you’ll do it. The winner will be drawn on Sunday and contacted via email. You must respond before Monday morning at 10:00 a.m. Mountain time to claim your prize. If you don’t respond to the email, another winner will be drawn. So leave your comment, share this post, and then watch for an email to see if you’re the winner!

If you’ve already registered and happen to win this drawing, I will let you select another session that you’d like to attend. So, if you’re sure you want to attend this, my suggestion is to get registered to be sure you get a seat and also enter the drawing! That’s a win/win for everyone!

I look forward to reading your comments. I’ll be accessing things remotely the next few days as I will be attending the Women of Faith conference in Denver. That will mean I won’t be able to respond to your comments until I return, but I will see and read them. Have a great rest of the week!