by Bob Trowbridge

Created on: July 13, 2010

As with many other fields, qualifications for medical transcription jobs have changed as the technology has changed. The basic qualifications haven’t changed but more training is required today because hospitals use special software now that must be learned.

The Good Old Days

I was first introduced to medical transcribing as a temp. My qualifications were that I had done a lot of personal transcribing. I was a good typist. I had worked for an insurance company where I had to learn a lot of medical terminology.

Of course much of that is of little use when you end up working in a specialty that is different from the terminology you learned at your previous job. I learned the terminology for creating an underwriting manual for long term care insurance. At that time, long-term care insurance was relatively new and I was helping to put the manual together for the underwriting department. This was at American Express.

My new temporary job was for the neurosurgery department at Stanford University Medical Center. Obviously the terminology was completely different and I had to start at the beginning.

In those days I simply listened to a dictated letter on tape and typed it in. The form was a letter to the patient’s primary care physician and any other physician that had seen the patient. These letters became part of the patient’s medical records. Copies were sent to all relevant doctors as well to the Medical Records department.

The Challenges

As I said, being a good typist is a minimal qualification. Being good at understanding different voices and different accents is a must. This is probably true for all hospitals. But university hospitals have doctors, nurses, and residents from many different countries. Some accents can be very difficult to decipher.

You must learn the terminology as quickly as possible. You will hear many words you have never heard before in the beginning. The spelling of many medical terms has little relation to how it sounds. You will have medical dictionaries, hard copies as well as online dictionaries.

You cannot rely on these for very long. It will take you forever to finish a letter or medical report if you have to look up every third word. The key is to use your word processing software to help you learn these words and create shortcuts to have them entered for you.

In Word, for example, there is something called AutoCorrect. This is designed to automatically correct commonly misspelled words. Most programs have something

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