Medical Transcriptionist
Medical Transcriptionist
Career Overview
Medical transcriptionists listen to recordings from physicians and other healthcare professionals and turn them into accurate medical reports. They also review and edit reports created by speech-recognition software, checking medical terminology, grammar, and accuracy.
Education
A postsecondary certificate in medical transcription is typically required or preferred. Programs can often be completed in less than one year and cover medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, medical documentation, grammar, and transcription skills. Some colleges offer one-year medical transcription certificates.
Work Environment
Medical transcriptionists work for hospitals, physicians' offices, outpatient facilities, and companies that provide healthcare documentation services. Many can work from home, receiving recordings electronically and submitting completed reports online. The work requires concentration, excellent listening and writing skills, and careful attention to detail.
Future Outlook
Medical transcription is changing rapidly as AI, speech-recognition, and natural-language technologies become more capable of creating medical documentation. This is reducing the need for traditional transcription, while creating a greater emphasis on reviewing, editing, and verifying AI-generated medical records. Students entering this field should expect technology to play a major role in the work and should build strong medical terminology, communication, digital, and AI-assisted documentation skills.
Recommended High School Courses
- Biology
- Computer Science
- English
- Health science
- Office Administration
- Keyboarding
- Word Processing
- Active Listening - Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.
- Critical Thinking - Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.
- Judgment and Decision Making - Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.
- Monitoring - Monitoring/Assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or organizations to make improvements or take corrective action.
- Reading Comprehension - Understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work related documents.
- Speaking - Talking to others to convey information effectively.
- Time Management - Managing one's own time and the time of others.
- Writing - Communicating effectively in writing as appropriate for the needs of the audience.
- Clerical - Knowledge of administrative and clerical procedures and systems such as word processing, managing files and records, stenography and transcription, designing forms, and other office procedures and terminology.
- Computers and Electronics - Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.
- English Language - Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
- Medicine and Dentistry - Knowledge of the information and techniques needed to diagnose and treat human injuries, diseases, and deformities. This includes symptoms, treatment alternatives, drug properties and interactions, and preventive health-care measures.
- Category Flexibility - The ability to generate or use different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways.
- Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
- Finger Dexterity - The ability to make precisely coordinated movements of the fingers of one or both hands to grasp, manipulate, or assemble very small objects.
- Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
- Information Ordering - The ability to arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (e.g., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations).
- Near Vision - The ability to see details at close range (within a few feet of the observer).
- Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
- Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
- Perceptual Speed - The ability to quickly and accurately compare similarities and differences among sets of letters, numbers, objects, pictures, or patterns. The things to be compared may be presented at the same time or one after the other. This ability also includes comparing a presented object with a remembered object.
- Problem Sensitivity - The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.
- Selective Attention - The ability to concentrate on a task over a period of time without being distracted.
- Speech Recognition - The ability to identify and understand the speech of another person.
- Written Comprehension - The ability to read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
- Written Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand.
- Perform clerical work in medical settings.
- Prepare medical reports or documents.
- Record vital statistics or other health information.
- Maintain medical records.
- Process medical billing information.
- Schedule patient procedures or appointments.
Schools
Approx Salary Expectation
References
Trend Analysis - Explorer the Market, Labour Market Information, Government of Canada https://www.jobbank.gc.ca/trend-analysis.
O*NET OnLine, National Center for O*NET Development, https://www.onetonline.org/.