There's always going to be a market, right?

I was talking to another MT today. First, I was letting her know I'd be leaving the company. Second, we came to the conclusion that in our lifetime, there would always be a need for MTs with our skills. That is a loaded consideration if you truly think about it.

In the 80s, when I accidentally got into MT, the IBM desktop computer and the Lanier Digital Dictation System were the thing. They were fun to learn and added some unintended benefit for me, a budding technodweeb, in that I got to play with computers all day! Regardless, I listened to clinicians dictate and busted out quality documents with "every document we sent out of here is a marketing tool" in my head. In other words, on my very first assignment, I was hit over the head repeatedly with "quality, quality, quality!" The department head told me on more than one occasion that speed would come, but accuracy was of the utmost importance. I hated her with a passion, but appreciate that she instilled in me this view of MT. It fit well with my perfectionistic tendencies. I was semi-hooked. I had words (my first love), accuracy as a goal, and fun people to work with.

Every magazine or journal that I read related to our field, though, was filled with gloom and doom. "Voice recognition" was bandied about. I needed to worry about my job!

Fast forward to now. I still read about speech recognition. I still hear and read stories of how it does or does not work well. We now have the evil EMR and doctors doing their own data entry during our office visits (that's a whole nuther blog entry), and the future is indeed upon us.

Where am I going with this?

I read Julie's blog today about the almost nonexistent barriers to entry and other qualities of a business you don't want to get into. I'm in the "last trimester" of my MT life. I was an MTSO. I was a manager, an administrator, a scheduler, a QA assistant, a this and a that. They all involve my being an MT. Everything Julie blogged is so true. As an MTSO, my verifiable billing was based on Word Perfect 5.1's word count. I charged X to my clients and paid up to 70% of X to the at-home MTs who did the transcription (before the internet, mind you!). You do the math. I wasn't making much. I was taught by the prior owner of my business to use the "K-Mart method" of getting lots and lots and lots of clients, charge them less, pay other people to do the work, and get rich, rich I tell you! It doesn't work that way. On paper, maybe it looks like something that might work, but the reality is that it didn't work. I made money, but not so much. And I transcribed right along with everyone else. I'm not a businessperson. I freely admit that. The business I took over folded after three years. I passed it on to one of my MTs and who knows if it still exists. It wasn't worth the effort for me. I was one of the small fries that Julie mentioned in her blog.

So, after that mayhem, after being "da man," I got back to my roots. I went back into MT as an MT and worked for a local urgent care center. The hardest part was getting up and going to work, but it settled my life in a big way and I got paid by the hour. From there, I began to work my way up the ladder from the inside at a large medical facility and was very content, but we were a small fry trying to grow into a large fry (the company has since been acquired by a large fry).

Okay, okay, my history is a lot like many others, but I'm getting there.

I got out. Was that the first or second time I'd gotten out? I can't remember But I came back. Twice. I was fortunate enough to land with AlphaBest and did a little bit of everything - recruiting, hiring, managing, working with MTs and clients on line and on the phone, doing some transcription, doing some QA, doing some of this and doing some of that. And now we're back to today's conversation from whence this long entry began. I was IMing with my cohort at AlphaBest to let her know I was moving on. I'm getting back into transcribing, about half time, for someone else. It's not as scary as when I went p.r.n. with AlphaBest, but it's still the end of what I consider to be the second "trimester" of my MT career.

What Julie didn't mention in her article on How to start an unprofitable business is the barrier to exit. There have been many, many barriers to exit in medical transcription for me. The thing is, there will always be a need for me or someone like me in my lifetime. My ambitions have changed and I'm finding inner content with the parent groups at Child Development Resources and am bringing some stability back in my life. This has been a step-wise process and not a decision made overnight. I'm going to be a "plain old MT" again. Back to where I began. Back to looking up words, learning new disciplines, and tapping the plastic for profit.

I feel very fortunate to have been there when the transition to word processors and computers had already taken place. I admire our foresisters and forebrothers who did this job on typewriters. I rue the lack of desire to do transcription right or to have clients willing to pay for it to be done correctly. It'll be interesting to see how the profession pans out over the next 10 years. But by then, I hope to be dazzling the world with my sewing machine. Of course, I know I'll always be able to come back, right?