Medical Transcription Trends

There are a lot of details to being a Medical Transcriptionist. Words are your life and Medical Words are your livelihood. Word Searching means to locate the medical word that is correct, both in spelling and meaning. This is a Medical Transcription skill that takes time and practice to develop. The following are a few tips to help you in this process.

• If you find yourself unable to locate a medical word in your reference books, it might be the word has an initial letter different than the sound or initial letter you hear. For example, the ‘v’ sounds very much like the letter ‘f.’  The letter ‘m’ may actually be an ‘x’ as in the word xiphoid and the ‘k’ might be ‘ch.’
• When you are unable to locate a phrase under a particular entry, look under a related entry.
• When you hear a phrase you cannot understand, look first under the noun and not the adjective. Nouns usually follow adjectives. An example: If you are looking for bullous emphysema, look under emphysema (the noun) and not bullous. To find particular diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, look under disease.
• If you exhaust all you know to do when word searching on the job, you should:

• Seek another transcriptionist’s opinion
• Refer to the patient’s chart
• Contact the dictating physician for clarification
• Leave a blank in the report and attach a note so that the dictator may insert the correct word

If you leave a blank in the report, you should flag the report by attaching a note with a paperclip. The note should list all blanks left in the report, and giving as many details as possible for ease of identification such as page and line number. The Medical Transcriptionist may also give a phonetic spelling of what the word or words sounded like to assist the dictator in filling in the blank or blanks.

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