July 5, 2001

• I own a medical transcription company.  It's a fun little job, and people ask me all the time what led me down this path.  So, in my very best http://www.xanga.com/verymodern form, I'll attempt to tell how it came to be.

  
  

  As I've rambled on about before, I used to work in a hospital emergency room.  When I wasn't being entertained by people bleeding and vomiting on my desk and children harassing patients in wheelchairs, I would sort through reports that magically appeared on the printer at hourly intervals.  They were reports the doctors dictated regarding each patient's visit. 

  
  

  As I purused these reports, I found horrible errors.  Not spelling errors, mind you... those would be caught in your basic spell checker program thingy.  These were things like:

  
  

  "A 70-year-old man was coming home from the Senior's dance, and dripped over a speed bump."  (Oops, they meant "tripped.")

  
  

  "The patient is a 4-year-old pregnant female..."  (Shoot-darn, she's 24.)

  
  

  I said to myself, "Self, even YOU can do better than THAT."  I type very fast, I'm pretty bright and I'd been hanging out in medical facilities for years.  I thought a good idea would be to check with medical transcription companies in town and see if they'd hire someone part-time, and I could see if I liked that type of work, without having to quit my nifty ER job.

  
  

  I flipped through the phone book, and got an interview at a medical transcription company.  I got a funky vibe as soon as I wandered in the door... no one looked happy to be there, and the owner was secluded in an office, looking more pissed-off than the rest, if that's possible.  I sat in front of her for our little talk, and she began by asking what made me want to get into this field.  I explained that I worked at that certain ER, and told her about the incredible errors.  A long pause ensued.

  
  

  "We type that hospital's ER reports," she said.

  
  

  I didn't get the job.

  
  

  Instead, I whipped up some postcard-type fliers, check around for what the going price was in town and undershot it, and did oodles of research.  A lovely man that believed in me invested a few thousand dollars to upgrade my computer and buy me some transcription equipment, and I was in business.

  
  

  My first client was a very patient plastic surgeon from West Texas who barely used medical language.  He tended to say things like "The patient cut himself with one of them there box cutter things."  He liked me, I liked him, and he told his doctor friends about me. 

  
  

  Now I rent office space, have employees, and life is good.  I'm very fortunate to do something I think is fun every day, and I get to be the Queen, to boot.  Life is good.

  • 2:57 pm
  • 1 Comment