I am well aware of the Medquist lawsuit and indeed you will find a blog post here about it. I call BS again as to your conclusions.

As far as MTIA, AHDI and irregularities, let me just point out – MTIA was advocating the BMP and MedQuist was a participant in the BMP program at the same time the “billing irregularities” were happening. So – color me not impressed by any of it. I call BS again.

I know your heart is in the right place. We’ll just have to disagree on the finer points here.

I appreciate your passion for this subject, even though your post could be seen as an attack on me professionally. I’ve been through the line counting wars and have thick skin, so no problem…

Like any article that combines random quotes from multiple sources, the story spun in the referenced article can be easily disassembled and made to look out of touch with what MT’s face in regard to volume measurements.

For a more comprehensive look, may I suggest you look in the For the Record transcription article archives (a tab on the main menu bar). Included is a complete article I wrote on the cost, quality and TAT recommended standards as promoted by AHIMA, MTIA and AHDI. The article (submitted as a 5,000 + word white paper) was broken into two sections: How Well Do You Measure Up and New Transcription Measures give Transcription a Jolt. In the article, the details of the justification for VBC counting are provided as well as a conversion chart to show equivalent rates for the various counting methods. To that end, we and your fellow bloggers are in complete agreement, if you change the counting method, you must convert the compensation rate.

As far as auditability goes, the VBC method is the most consistent approach by far as it can easily be validated with Microsoft Word or just about any other word processing software. The only issue to watch for is that in Word, the characters in the header and footer are not considered in the “characters without spaces” or any other option under the Tools menu bar Word Count function.

On the other hand, if you think it doesn’t matter which counting method you use because they all can be equally manipulated, you must not have be aware of the class action lawsuits settled against MedQuist (won by the buyers, lost by the MT’s).

And although I am not an MT, I have been in the industry for more than 10 years and spent the first ten years of my life as a technical writer, often compensated by production. I’ve strongly lobbied on behalf of the MT’s both in DC with the AHDI Advocacy Days as well as in the numerous articles I’ve written and had published in various magazines over the years.

Ask around in the industry … anyone who knows me will tell you, I am not the enemy on volume measurement and fair comepnsation for MT’s. In fact, the opposite may be true as I received top honors a few years back when MTIA recognized me as promoting billing ethics and integrity better than anyone else in the industry.

Dale

And Jules, I’m not sure how counting VBC would work. Does that count erasing mistakes I make and retype? Does it count when the doc says no change that?

Sorry, end of day, very tired and very curious.

Anyone with half a brain can count the lines in a document with all characters including spaces, and then count using VBC only, and see the difference. If paid at the same rate, how can ANYONE say the MT is not losing money, when they are only being paid for 3/4 (or whatever) of what they type?! Those spaces do NOT get their by themselves, and its ridiculous not to pay for them.