[H1639]How To Start Medical Practice

There are many reasons why someone would want to become a Medical Transcriptionist. It is an absolutely critical element of quality health care, as every time a patient is seen by his or her physician notes on that visit are placed in the patient's medical records. Accurate transcription of the doctor's dictation is vital in portraying the patient's medical condition, especially if he or she should be referred to a different physician.

Some of the reasons you might consider becoming a transcriptionist are:

1. Medical transcription is a critical and honorable profession.

It's been said that the United States is the best place in the world to be if you are sick. One of the reasons for that is that we have professional transcriptionists entering all of the details of every doctor's visit accurately into a patient's medical records. If we did not have fast, reliable transcriptionists keeping medical records up to date, we would have a great deal of mistakes in health care!

2. There is an ongoing need for true professionals.

According to the U.S. Government Dept. of Labor, there will be a great need for transcriptionists over other occupations through 2016: "Employment of medical transcriptionists is projected to grow 14 percent from 2006 to 2016, faster than the average for all occupations. Demand for medical transcription services will be spurred by a growing and aging population. Older age groups receive proportionately greater numbers of medical tests, treatments, and procedures that require documentation. The current population of medical transcriptionists is aging and retiring. There is a supply and demand problem. The demand for quality transcriptionists is greater than the number of new people entering the field. And guess what? People continue to go to the doctor!

3. There is the potential to work from home, either as an employee or an independent contractor.

The freedom to have a 30-second commute is a powerful lure, but there is more: you also get to set your own hours, pretty much, when you work at home. Like working at 3AM? That's cool...Once you have established yourself in the business with several years of experience, there is no end of opportunities out there for you to work at home; some small doctors group in your town is bound to be in need of help, and you'll find there is probably a fairly large network of independent transcriptionists referring work to each other.

4. There is the potential to build your own business with an income limited only by your willingness to work hard.

You can be your only employee, or you can have a whole "stable" of transcriptionists adding to your income. Some of the largest transcription firms today began as one-person businesses. The more people you have working for you, the less you have to work at transcribing yourself, as you will be taking part of your employees' per-line rate for yourself - or rather, part of the rate you charge the client will be skimmed off the top before you pay your employees. The income potential is really limited only by your ability to bring in new clients and keep a stable of reliable transcriptionists working.

5. The work is absolutely fascinating on a continual basis.

Each report is different from every other, since every patient is different from every other. It's fascinating to see how two people can have ostensibly the same condition, yet their different physical makeups can cause very different symptoms to appear. Since you would probably be in the field for several years, the chances are fairly great that you would migrate from one specialty area to another over time. Boredom will surely be alleviated if you change specialties, with the new terminology, and the new doctors' speaking patterns and idiosyncrasies.