July 29, 2006
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Bottom of the rung!

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Dear Friends,

I need to quote here:

"Says Ranjit Narasimhan, president & CEO, HCL BPO, 'For ITES, for
instance, medical transcription has been the lowest end of the
value chain. After starting in that area, the industry moved on to
voice-based processes, then transaction-based ones, and now to the
KPO segment.'"

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1794318.cms

This is not the first time I would have heard something to this
effect in general, but this gentleman puffed with all his IIT & IIM
degrees, and sitting at the helm of a large company goes
overboard - MT is the lowest end of the value chain, period. All
data processors and the myriads of call centers are higher up in
the "value chain."

While the gentleman in question is blissful in his ignorance, it
does concern us how such ignorance is propagated, and comes back to
haunt us every time around. Yesterday I received a call from a lady
in Mumbai, who was very disheartened to know I wouldn't pay her INR
30,000 per month to work from home. She did know English and could
consider an online course.

Here's something, the likes of which I am finding very frequently:

"Woman, internet is your handy employment exchange!

We have a whole generation of women who quit working when they
start a family. Most of these women are upper middle class well
qualified women who were on their way up the corporate ladder. Are
you one of them?

Transcriptions: Business Processing Outfits (BPOs) hire medical
transcribers by the dozens. There is option to work at the BPO
office or right out of your own home using earphones and a
computer. A short medical transcription course can help you along
as well as get you faster jobs."

http://news.moneycontrol.com/india/news/financialplanning/transcriptiononlinemed\
ia/womaninternetisyourhandyemploymentexchange/market/stocks/article/230928

We do need to get back to the media more frequently, and educate
them. MT might be the bottom rung as far as Healthcare BPO is
concerned, but tell me, how many companies in India successfully
run Healthcare BPO operations? There are high entry level barriers
to the Healthcare BPO industry, which many of these big time
players realized first hand when they made a foray into MT in
1999-2001.

If you go to the HCL BPO website, this is what they have to offer:

"Contact Management and Front Office Support - HCL BPO Services
provides a comprehensive range of Voice/Web base Contact and Front
Office Services that span Collections, Sales & Marketing, Technical
Help Desk and Customer Care."

And such an operation is commenting about medical transcription
being the lowest end of the value chain? Maybe all of us should
send him a greeting card for his contribution to the BPO industry!

Ciao!

Dr Amit Chatterjee, SM
Strategist / Founder ~ mailto:amit@...
MT India ~ www.mtindia.org
"The Community of MT Professionals"

"It takes years to become an overnight success! Inch by inch, it's
a cinch."

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NEWS AND VIEWS :
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1) MD-IT buys Texas company

MD-IT announced that it completed its acquisition of Trans Med Plus
Inc.

Under the agreement, MD-IT will acquire the outstanding stock of
Trans Med Plus and the former owners will join the management team
of MD-IT. Specific financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Last October, MD-IT acquired Denver-based ProMed Transcription for
a combination of stock and shares. In January 2005, MD-IT received
a round of angel funding from CTEK Angels, the largest organized
group of individual private investors in the state of Colorado.

http://denver.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2006/07/31/daily2.html

2) Spheris Sets Second Quarter 2006 Earnings Release and Conference
Call Dates

Spheris plans to issue its earnings release for the second quarter
of 2006 before the market opens on August 14, 2006, and will host a
conference call on August 14, 2006, at 8:00 a.m. CDT. The number to
call for this interactive teleconference is 507-726-3518.

The live broadcast of Spheris' quarterly conference call will be
available online at http://www.spheris.com and
http://www.videonewswire.com/event.asp?id=34648 on August 14, 2006,
at 8:00 a.m. CDT. The online replay will be available shortly after
the call and will continue for 30 days.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/07-24-200\
6/0004402481&EDATE=

3) MedQuist Announces Resignation of Jan H.M. Hommen from its Board
of Directors

MedQuist Inc. announced that Jan. H.M. Hommen resigned from
MedQuist's Board of Directors, as both a director and the
non-executive Chairman of the Board, effective as of July 21, 2006.
MedQuist also announced that its Board of Directors appointed
director, Jouko Karvinen, to be the non-executive Chairman of the
Board, effective as of July 22, 2006.

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&ne\
wsId=20060727005878&newsLang=en

4) IT Team pushes for MT industry in the Philippines

The Bacolod City IT Focus Team and Mayor Evelio Leonardia are
pushing for the establishment of the Medical Transcription Industry
in the city, citing the growing demand of more hospitals in the
United States that are outsourcing their MT needs to the
Philippines, a press release from the office of Councilor Jocelle
Batapa-Sigue said.

Batapa said the IT Team and MT Industry can provide job
opportunities for nurses and unemployed graduates of medical
courses in Bacolod.

There is a growing demand for MT now because more hospitals are
outsourcing their MT needs to the Philippines because of a US law
that requires all medical records to be digitized, MT trainer Ryan
Herrera of MTC Academy said in the same press release. An efficient
medical transcriptionist can earn as much as P3,000 a day based on
the records of Accutype and Innovaquest, two firms all specializing
in medical transcription, Batapa said.

http://www.visayandailystar.com/2006/July/25/businessnews2.htm

5) Medical Transcription is Different

Because of HIPAA (patient privacy) laws, anyone who assigns work to
medical trasncriptionists must be very careful about data security,
and thus can't assign work to just anybody anymore. Everyone has to
be connected to a VPN of some kind.

I work for a transcription service as an editor, and although the
company does employ some offshore MTs from India, the account I
work on specifies that no offshores be assigned to their account.

This may not simply be an issue of security; when I have edited the
work of Indian "offshores" for other accounts, I have noticed that
they tend to make a lot of crucial errors, particularly with
numbers (getting numbers wrong is absolutely fatal in this
business, messing them up can be literally a matter of life and
death). Thus offshore MTs haven't completely taken over the jobs of
Americans just yet, and are unlikely to any time soon.

However, more and more raw dictation is being fed to
speech-recognition software, and rather than typing, more MTs are
being utilized to "clean up" the software-generated reports. I'd
imagine that trend will eventually subsume non-medical
transcriptions as well. At least it's easier on the body than
typing all day.

http://letters.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/view/
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Thank you for your interest in MT India!

The MTIndia Team
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