MT India Newsletter - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MTIndia

11 Jan 2003
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ANNOUNCEMENT
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MTs & HR Managers who want to keep a tab on the Job Mart are
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Please use the Job Center:
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The MTIndia Team
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The common well
~Subhorup Dasgupta

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Dear Friends,

I am publishing a piece which was an entry to the professional
writing competition @ mtindia.org, 2002.

Enjoy and cherish!
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Medical transcription is a field where one has to stay on one's
intellectual toes every single day. Unlike other careers where you
concentrate on a specific field of knowledge (for example, accounting
or XML conversion) that changes perhaps once in one or two years,
medical transcription, by virtue of its dealing with the human
condition, encompasses all areas of knowledge and needs to be
constantly updated. You have no way of knowing that just after
dictating the pros and cons of congenital malformation screening, the
dictator is not going to launch into a letter to the governor on the
futility of lobbying with Scots for tort reforms. Just being up on
the latest medical terminology is not a guarantee that you will be
transcribing 100% accurate documents.

At a recent training session, we tried listing out all the areas of
knowledge that needed to be included in a personal program of ongoing
education in the field of medical transcription. To the surprise of
all the participants, the list grew and grew till it had almost every
conceivable subject in it. This aspect of transcription is also what
makes it so exciting and so much more challenging than most other IT
enabled fields. The most minimalist common body of knowledge for a
newbie MT is just about everything there is to know on the face of
this planet.

I was fortunate in being walked through my initial days in
transcription by mentors whose zest for transcription was paralleled
only by their zest for life. I learnt two big lessons from them.
The first is that one does not give up till there is even a remote
resource yet to be checked out, and when all resources are exhausted,
to gracefully acknowledge your not knowing. The other is that one
has to continuously strive to excel and to improve.

Down the line, I was lucky to have come into contact with other
people who instilled in me the enthusiasm and passion for the work
that has served me well through the years. I have formed a few
beliefs and paradigms of my own as I have traveled along. These are
all things that probably your mother always told you, but they hold
true in every way.

The first thing that an MT needs to keep in mind is that they are a
part of a communication process. The process begins with the patient
contact and the exchange between the patient and the physician. That
communication process has its own rituals, the presenting complaint,
the history taking and the physical exam , the lab studies, the
impression and the plan. That done, the physician then dictates it
for the transcriptionist, where he structures it according to his
frame of reference. This is what we get to work with. What we do is
put down on paper what the dictator communicated to us, and
communicate it back to his office.

The common grouse of many an MT is that the dictation was tough, the
audio was poor, the terms were obscure and the grammar was off. But
if we look at it as just another communication process, the troubles
seem lesser. Think of a person with atrocious Hindi, shouting from
across a noisy room about more efficient ways to keep your whites
really white. If you give it the attention you would if you were
having trouble keeping your whites really white, you would figure it
out, right? What made the difference was your desire to know about
and willingness to decipher how to keep your whites really white.
The same thing applies to the dictation.

What makes a dictation difficult is a mix of factors. On top of the
list for MTs in India is probably vocabulary and syntax. Physicians
in the US go through the best of education. They usually end up
spending a lot of money by the time they have an MD after their
name. This education is often reflected in a very large vocabulary
and in the use of syntax not commonly used. You wouldn't buy a
Ritu Beri outfit only to sleep in would you? The other category
of "challenging" dictators are the ESL dictators. These physicians
carry with them, apart from their heavily accented pronunciation, the
syntax of their own language, which is difficult to understand if you
do not know their language. The solution of course is to get a basic
understanding of the grammar of that particular language, it surely
helps, but it might not always be possible. However, what is
possible, especially if you have large volumes of dictation from that
particular dictator, is to try and understand the way his mind
structures things. It is similar to how we recognize and distinguish
a spoof on Shatrughan Sinha from one on Shahrukh Khan, one on
Dharmendra from one on Dev Anand.

........to be continued.
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Cheers!!!

Maj (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."

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ADVERTISEMENT
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Focus Infosys, Bangalore
------------------------------

On-call part-time work at our company premises

Eligibility :
a. Should have undergone formal medical transcription training.
b. Should have a minimum experience of 6 months.
c. should be a resident of Bangalore.

Compensation:
a. Rs. 1.25 per line of transcription sent directly to the client.
b. 75 paise per line of transcription, which needs proofing.
c. 50 paise per line to proofread and send directly to the client.

P.S. Need not wait until the end of the month for the pay cheque.
Walk away with the cash or cheque at the end of each day. Perhaps,
this is what they call minting money :)

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NEWS AND VIEWS :
-----------------------------

1) 1) Booster dose for land of origin?

Even as Indians make it big in the medical profession in the US, the
American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) has come
to represent one of the most influential ethnic organisations
serving, specifically, the interests of Indian American doctors and
more broadly that of Indian doctors and Indians.

From an idea born out of a basement chat 20 years ago, now the
Chicago headquartered AAPI is an umbrella for more than 100 member
associations across the US. AAPI, in fact, represents a huge
constituency of 35,000 physicians and almost 10,000 medical students
and residents.

The early years were a struggle to establish equality with American
doctors. Founders of AAPI like like Dr Navin C Shah, an urologist in
Riverdale, Maryland, took on the American Medical Association, when
it ignored the demand of equality for international medical graduates.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/comp/articleshow?
artid=33788291&sType=1

2) Rx: Dollars For A Healthy India

The government on Friday invited people of Indian origin (PIO) to
invest in medical education and health infrastructure in the country.
Minister of Health, Shatrughan Sinha also invited foreign direct
investment (FDI) in areas of information management, transcription,
and health tourism. American Association of Physicians of Indian
Origin president Dr Kiran Patel said facilitating FDI in healthcare
could lead to inflow of PIO dollars which could be much more
efficiently utilised.

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=25703

3) Advocates giving away free wireless Net service

Matt Hallacy is giving away high-speed Internet access to anyone
who passes by his Inver Grove Heights apartment building.

Next to a window in his apartment, Hallacy has positioned a
wireless networking device for his PC that he bought at a local
electronics store. It transmits his Internet connection outdoors to
any computer within 300 yards. Any laptop or handheld computer with
a $50 wireless circuit card can receive the signal and use it to
access the Internet.

Thus, Hallacy has created a "hot spot" -- a location where Internet
access is available via Wi-Fi, an industry-standard technology
whose name stands for "wireless fidelity." Thousands of such hot
spots are springing up across the nation, some available for a fee,
some free.

About 360 doctors at the University of Minnesota Physicians, a
nonprofit organization in Minneapolis, are using handheld computers
to access a Wi-Fi network at 21 medical clinics associated with the
Fairview-University Medical Center in Minneapolis. But so far the
wireless network is used only to view schedules or to transfer
doctors' tape-recorded notes to a transcription service, said
Maryanne Moore, director of information services for the physicians
group.

Doctors at Abbott Northwestern Hospital have even bigger plans, but
those are a year or two in the future. Dr. Robert Schwartz, a
cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute, a division of
Abbott Northwestern Hospital, wants a Wi-Fi network that would
automatically transmit relevant medical information to his handheld
computer as he walks into a patient's room.

"We spend a lot of time gathering information instead of processing
it. If I can get that information pushed to my handheld computer, I
won't have to collect bits of paper here and there," Schwartz said.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/789/3566189.html

4) Military Deploys Digitized Patient Record

A computerized system will eventually provide military physicians
with fast, around- the-clock access to patient records anywhere in
the world, a DoD health care official noted.

The Composite Health Care System II, a digitized, networked patient
record system, has been green-lighted for deployment to serve the
military health care system's 8.7 million beneficiaries, Navy Dr.
(Cmdr.) Robert Wah said. The recently approved system, he remarked,
is slated to debut at up to seven military hospitals within the
next year.

Using computers in the medical field has proven to be a more
accurate, efficient way of doing business, Wah remarked. In the
military, for example, the old, sometimes difficult to read,
pharmacy prescription slip is a thing of the past, he asserted.

"Military physicians order all medications on computers today," he
said. "We've been able to do that for 10 years now." He pointed out
that most doctors in the civilian world still fill out paper
prescription slips.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2002/n12242002_200212241.html

5) Women say doctor made inappropriate sexual contact.

The Alaska State Medical Board fined an Anchorage internist $3,000
during an emergency board meeting Friday, saying he engaged in
several instances of inappropriate sexual contact at work during
the past 20 years that traumatized nurses and caused one colleague
to quit her job.

In 2002, a transcriptionist reported that she worked with Stewart
in the early 1980s. Stewart allegedly kissed her at least twice and
repeatedly rubbed against her inappropriately.

"For the remainder of the time I was employed with Internal
Medicine, Dr. Stewart continued to subject me to sneak attacks in
the file room and in the transcription room," she stated in the
affidavit. She told her husband she was having problems with a
doctor at work and quit her job.

The woman said she complained to the office manager and threatened
to sue the doctor for sexual harassment. The office manager told
her to leave the job and that Stewart wanted her fired, the
affidavit said.

http://www.adn.com/alaska/story/2280915p-2343283c.html

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The MTIndia Team
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