MT Exchange Medical transcription exchange

You know you’ve really made the big time when your blog starts getting spammed by spammers who are actually on topic. That means your blog is ranking well for targeted search terms; in my case, that would be medical transcription.

I’d like to thank all the spammers out there who have tried everything imaginable to get their spammy medical transcription links on my blog pages. Now – cut it out.

Thank you. Have a nice holiday.

This year is flying by us. Before we know it, it’s going to be 2010 – and that means significant changes in privacy and security measures for service providers to the healthcare industry. One of the more important changes for the medical transcription industry is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which becomes effective in February 2010. Just when you thought the government couldn’t make anything more convoluted and difficult than HIPAA – they came up with HITECH. Never underestimate the ability of bureaucracy to confuse the public!

In an effort to help doctors make sense of this mess, The AMA News collaterally helps out business associates, so it’s a good idea to follow along if you are interested in what the doctors are being told and how it applies to medical transcription services. Attorney Steven Harris, reporting in the AMA News, writes:

Those agreements you signed to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act probably need to be torn up, rewritten and re-signed.

One of the most significant changes that HITECH makes to HIPAA is that the relationship becomes bilateral. Under HIPAA, medical transcription service providers were not covered entities. Under HITECH, they are. Under HIPAA, the physician was responsible for monitoring business associates for breaches. Under HITECH, the business associate must also monitor the physician’s compliance.

In another article, Stimulus package alters HIPAA rules for business associates, Mr. Harris goes into some informative detail about what business associates are supposed to be protecting:

A business associate is someone who, on behalf of a covered entity, performs an activity involving the use of disclosure of individuals’ health care information.

…Under the stimulus bill, several HIPAA security provisions now apply to business associates in the same manner that those provisions apply to covered entities. That means business associates of covered entities will now have an affirmative duty to protect the confidentiality of electronic protected health information created, received, maintained or transmitted in performing services for or on behalf of covered entities.

Even if you are only providing services 1:1 to a physician, read the article by Mr. Harris and take steps to protect yourself. He suggests that a contract should outline what steps the physician will take if there is a suspected breach, so that both parties know what to expect and for reporting purposes.

At this point, other than to say it’s probably time to start looking at the contractual relationship you have with your clients, regardless of how little you think you are and/or whether or not you believe HITECH will impact you in any significant way. I’m not going to go into detail about what MTs may or may not be required to do as a result of this legislation; I will suggest that you follow Mr. Harris’ articles at the AMA News. They’re written for doctors, but MTs and MTSOs will be able to apply much of what he writes about.

In her Facebook group for medical transcriptionists, Kathy Nicholls asks the question:

I am fascinated by how social media is changing our world today. People are on FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so many other places. Yet it does not seem to me that this has caught on very fast with MTs. I wonder why? I just finished a course in inbound marketing, just working on what else can be done on the internet, and as I searched my networks for MTs, I don’t find many. How about you? Are you on other services? If so, what benefits do you see? If not, any particular reason why? I look forward to some discussion!

I started to answer this over in the Facebook group – but then it became complicated, so I decided to blog it.

Each type of social media serves a specific purpose and therefore it will attract users whose needs are met by that specific purpose. If a potential user doesn’t see a need, they won’t use the social media. And let’s face it – most social media doesn’t come with a clear-cut set of instructions.

I recently posted: “I’ve been tweeting for 2 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, 1 day, 2 hours, 15 minutes, 53 seconds.” Someone noted that I must have started using Twitter in its infancy. Well, I did sign up when it was a new service, but it took me awhile to figure out exactly how it could be useful or fun. Until I saw the purpose of using Twitter, I didn’t use it. The same would be true of anyone, including MTs.

One problem with the proliferation of social media is the duplication of purpose, which (IMO) creates confusion among users. And, like many users, I refuse to sign up for every service that comes out just because a couple people I know use this service and not that service. Even if you’re just using the major social networking sites (for this purpose, I’ll say Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter), you can spend a lot of time socializing there. Add in 3 “just like Twitter” sites, a couple “just like Facebook” sites and suddenly you’re spending more time than you can possibly justify, just keeping track of social networks. The purpose of social networks is to socialize – not just sign up so you have an account. It’s time consuming to set up an account, find friends and then maintain social contact. Users have to focus on what serves them best – and stick with that. At the core of any type of networking is building relationships – and that takes time.

For a medical transcription business or a vendor serving the medical transcription industry, use of social media has a completely different purpose and therefore a completely different approach. I’m going to assume that since Kathy posed this question in a forum composed primarily at practitioner MTs, the discussion should center around how the average practitioner MT can benefit from social media.  (Should I apply to have this article approved for CEC credits??)

LinkedIn: LI is primarily a business networking site. The fact that many MTs don’t participate doesn’t surprise me. It’s been my observation that the MTSOs and vendors serving the industry aren’t all that good at it, either. It really isn’t a very good social networking tool for practitioner MTs. Like Facebook, there are many, many related groups. There’s a reason for belonging to groups, but it has little to do with getting questions answered. I would never go to a LinkedIn group and ask a word help question. And, because you simply cannot be anonymous, I also wouldn’t ask specific employment questions. Regardless of how ineffective MT companies may be at using LinkedIn, it probably isn’t a good idea to post company-specific information or questions there when your own name is attached to them. Since the primary purpose of LinkedIn is business networking, IMO the average practitioner MT isn’t going to find it very useful in answering day-to-day questions about work or industry.

Facebook: Facebook is, obviously, a very social site. You can connect with friends, family, coworkers, people of like interest. Most people don’t view it as a place for work. Like LinkedIn, anybody can start a special interest group – and many do. So far, I’ve found over 10 Facebook groups for medical transcription, and that’s not counting the company-sponsored groups. Most of these groups have crossover; i.e., members who belong to one group are very likely to belong to the other groups. Active participation in all groups would be  extremely time consuming. While it’s easy to monitor the newsfeed for these groups, just monitoring the newsfeed isn’t socializing within the group. What I do like about Facebook is it allows me to stay in touch (in a virtual way) without feeling like I’m intruding on someone else’s time. I read their wall, look at their pictures and follow in my newsfeed. I also find it easier to message people there, rather than use e-mail. To make it even easier, I use the Facebook toolbar for Firefox.

Twitter: I personally enjoy Twitter, but I know a lot of people who don’t get it and a lot of people who just get plain crazy when confronted with how it works. I’m not sure it has a lot of use for the average medical transcriptionist and I’m pretty sure if an MT did get hooked on it, it could become a time-sucking black hole that would be detrimental to productivity! Finding other people of like interest on Twitter depends on one of two things: (1) they have included in their profile meaningful keywords that identify their interests briefly and accurately and/or (2) they have tweeted using keywords that identifies their interest. I can search for people tweeting about transcription but if medical transcriptionists aren’t tweeting about their work or what they do, I am not going to find them using this method. Likewise, if their profile doesn’t mention anything about medical transcription, I can’t find them.

Kathy’s question on Facebook references inbound marketing. Well, here’s the thing – most MTs aren’t interested in marketing, so they don’t use social media for marketing, inbound or outbound. Effective use of ALL social media requires a really good understanding of how it works and what it can do for the user. I think most MTs either aren’t seeing how it can help them in their work and/or they just aren’t interested; therefore, if they use social media, they use it for personal reasons and not necessarily to socialize or network with other MTs. Many people prefer to socialize face to face, so they don’t want to spend their time in virtual social networks. It is possible that if the MT services were more effective in using social media, practitioner MTs might see some benefit to it.

… there was the Usenet. And the Usenet is/was the Wild, Wild West of the internet. And the medical transcriptionists who wandered through the pre-GUI (that’s graphical user interface, to those of you who don’t remember what a C-prompt is!) internet got tired of not having their own space in the Usenet and therefore they put together a charter (for that’s how a new Usenet group was formed) and the charter was voted upon and passed and the MTs did have their own Usenet group: sci.med.transcription, which became known as SMT. (For a copy of the charter and other information about SMT, please refer to the SMT Frequently Asked Questions.) Amazingly, at that time, AOL did not allow its users out to play on the internet – they were restricted to AOL’s proprietary space. And there was a thriving community there, of which many of us knew little unless an AOL user also happened to have a shell account outside AOL. At some point, AOL did allow its users access to the Internet and the MTs of AOL joined the MTs at SMT, reveling in the unmoderated world of Usenet. And there was cussing and discussing, friends made and enemies made, alliances formed and broken, theories expounded, trolls and flames and asbestos underwear (virtually speaking).

When I got on the internet, there was no World Wide Web (WWW). Nope, none at all. I bought a book on how to navigate the internet and there was one whole page devoted to the WWW – which, at the time, was only a discussion, a gleam in someone’s eye. I remember spending hours gophering through nodes on the internet to find material, which I then had to print because you couldn’t download and save it, or bookmark it for later, and heaven knows it took long enough to find it in the first place! I also spent hours on Usenet, getting in lengthy and heartfelt discussions with people I was never, ever going to meet. Quite frankly, at this point I don’t even remember any of them, and I stayed up much too late on too many nights just to read and post.

Online is where I’ve met most of my MT friends (ok, and a couple of frenemies).

Taking over at MT Chat has really put me in a reflective mood at how much the internet has changed, how much all of us have changed and how medical transcription has changed, so I went tromping through the Ancient Archives, some of which I’m going to share. Some of these are really funny – as in, OMG I can’t believe I/we/someone said that! But we did. And either we’ve changed or MT has changed but one thing that was great about the Usenet – your words lived on!

So here goes, folks – goodies from the SMT archives! At the risk of revealing how long some of us have been on the internet…

Just in case you were wondering if the question “can you work at home with children” has come up before, here’s a post from December 1996:

In general, the response to Maggie was positive – most of us worked at home. Funny how I didn’t notice at the time how many of these were from women whose children were grown!

And the answer I thought was funniest (and, sadly, probably too apropos!):

I hope my readers are enjoying this blast from the past as much as I am and if the response is positive, I’ll keep digging through SMT. I’m sure there’s more than a few things I’ve said there that I’ll be embarrassed about now!

It’s been a week since the relaunch of MT Chat and I have to say – it’s been interesting.

One thing I’ve found as I’ve taken over ownership of the two sites is that very few people differentiate between MT Desk and MT Chat. When MTs talk about MT Desk, they are usually referring to the discussion forums that are at MT Chat. When MT Desk was first launched in 1997, the discussion forums were part of the site; they weren’t moved to their own site until some time in 1999. In looking at the content of MT Desk, I began to get an inkling as to why MTs were completely ignoring it: apparently, the content hasn’t changed in years.

I’ve participated at MT Desk since it was first launched in 1997. The content was always reliable – well researched and very current. In the early days of the internet, MTs who were online could rely on the information at MT Desk. That all changed after the ownership changed, and the site content became stagnant.

My hope for the new MT Desk is to revive it as the best reference site for medical transcription. The MT Reference Style Guide, which is a project I’ve been working on for the past year (and then some), has been moved to MT Desk and renamed the MT Desk Reference and Style Guide. The goal for the style guide is that it will be compatible with the AHDI Book of Style for Medical Transcription, but it will be more dynamic. Using the wiki format allows me to respond to users, to include more of the resources from around the internet, as well as illustrations, graphs and pictures. I’m excited with what’s been done with it so far, and I’m looking forward to completing the project with the help of input from the medical transcription community.

In addition to the ongoing style guide, I plan on using MT Desk to give a permanent, more searchable home, to some of the more pertinent discussions that have taken place, continue to take place and will take place in the future at MT Chat. It’s very resource-intensive to maintain conversations going back years and the harsh reality is that at some point, discussion forums have to get trimmed. Many discussions simply aren’t worth maintaining into pepetuity. However, the best information can be moved to the MT Desk wiki, where it won’t be lost. I found that, unfortunately, some of the pertinent discussions, which had been “pinned” to the top of the forums because they were pertinent to MTs, were lost in the Great Crash of 2009, when almost 3 years of posts were lost.

In spite of the fact that moving all the old discussions to the archives would leave many of the forums with very few posts, I decided to do just that. It was confusing to people when they went to forums and found posts from 2006. It made the discussion forums appear stagnant.

Another interesting thing about MT Chat is the number of lurkers in the forum. Lurkers are visitors who read but don’t post. MT Chat gets over 500 unique visitors a day and over 40,000 page views, but only a handful of regulars post to the forums. I’m not sure what would be interesting enough to people to get them to participate in the discussions.

I’m looking forward to getting feedback about both sites and continuing to work on building these sites back up to being the #1 resources for medical transcriptionists on the internet.