Medical Transcription Work At Home

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Well, yes, absolutely. Thousands of people are engaged in medical transcription work at home every day.

Working at home is a situation that many people aspire to, to escape the rat race of commuting, paying for childcare, wear and tear on the car. Medical Transcription does indeed offer that to those willing to go through the training and get some experience under their belts.

What is Medical Transcription, anyway?

Well, it's like this: When you go to see your doctor, or go to the hospital, your physician dictates notes of your visit afterward so they can be put in your file and they have a better picture of your medical history.  Medical transcriptionists (MTs) listen to the dictation, and type it into a document in the format that the doctor or hospital requires.

That's it in a nutshell. There are hundreds of specialties within the field, such as Cardiology, Oncology, Pediatrics, etc. You get the idea.

A transcriptionist must have the ability to listen intently, have a good memory for medical terminology and be able to type fairly rapidly. She or he must also have good punctuation and grammar skills, to accurately type the doctor's sentences correctly. These are just a few of the skills you would need to excel in the field.

So what about working from home?

As I said above, many thousands of people, about thirty percent of the workforce (according to the Dept. of Labor), work from home in transcription. You basically have two options if you want to work at home:

You could work as an employee for a national service, or you could start your own business and hire yourself out as a contractor to a service, or even to local doctors' offices or small hospitals.

Most large hospitals offer the option of working at home as well, but normally that is not until the employee has gone through training and has been on the job for some period of time. You will not start out working from home right away at a large hospital, in all likelihood.

Most transcriptionists don’t start out working from home, actually, in fact. Most services are reluctant to hire a work-at-home MT who is fresh out of transcription school. They want to be sure the employee or contractor has a decent amount of experience and has proven him- or herself in the field before letting them work at home.

Yes, working at home is definitely possible as a medical transcriptionist, and you can even make a fairly good living at it at the same time. But it’s just not quite as easy as some would have you believe.

If you want to get the real story about what it’s really like to be a professional medical transcriptionist, then you should pick up a copy of Inside Medical Transcription by Pam Lyon. You can get your copy here.