Mary Quintigliani has been a medical transcriptionist for
nearly 30 years. It is a career that has given her a flexible schedule and
the chance to be at home with her kids when they were growing up.
Quintigliani says medical transcription is a great career choice that more
people need to hear about.
"This career is not publicized enough, I think," says Quintigliani. "A
lot of the people that I talk to say, 'What do you do? What does that mean?
What does that involve?'"
Unlike most MTs, Quintigliani didn't start out by taking a medical transcription
program. Right after high school she got hired for an administrative position
at a hospital.
"I just started right out of high school in the radiology department,"
says Quintigliani. "At first I was a receptionist there and then they moved
me over within a couple months into transcription of radiology reports."
Quintigliani later got a full-time position in the health records department.
She taught herself more about medical transcription by reading textbooks owned
by coworkers who had taken an MT course. "I found it so interesting... that
I found it easy to learn," she says.
When Quintigliani got married and started a family, she quit her job at
the hospital and started working at home as a contractor for a large medical
transcription company. She says working from home isn't for everyone.
"You've got to be well disciplined to be able to work at home because you
do not have any social interaction with anyone, which is one the biggest things
I miss," says Quintigliani. "But as long as you are disciplined and can stay
focused to get your work done [then it's fine].
"And you kind of have to be fast too in medical transcription and have
a good knowledge of your anatomy, your pharmacology. You have to have a good
basis for that because you're working by yourself so you don't have any one
to ask questions to. The Internet is great nowadays, that we can Google things
and get some of our questions answered."
Medical transcriptionist Sarah Moore's entire family is in the medical
field. In high school she took a typing elective.
"My mom was an office manager at a family practice that had an in-house
transcription team -- they had all [these] typists sitting around," says Moore.
"And I just trained with them for awhile and then I just started contracting
work from different doctors' offices. And then I got more and more word of
mouth and so I started a business."
Moore currently employs five typists to assist her with medical transcription.
In the past she has employed as many as 10. Moore says medical transcription
is tough work.
"You have a turnaround time -- you have to sit there and pump away," says
Moore. "It takes a lot of mental toughness. That might sound silly, but it's
hard to sit there and type it all out. When you know you have to get it done
by a certain time... it's very mentally exhausting. And then, of course, being
stuck inside a house all day -- even though you're working, that's kind of
hard."
Working from home as an MT has its advantages, says Carey Silverstein.
He's the director of operations for a medical transcription company that employs
450 MTs. "
First of all, there are tax advantages," says Silverstein. "You're able
to have certain write-offs regarding your home expenses that you normally
wouldn't have. You definitely save on the commute, you save on expenses of
having to purchase lunch or office wear [and] parking or public transit. There's
a lot of savings from working from home."
Silverstein says it can be tough working alone at home, however. "On the
other side of it, you can be isolated," says Silverstein. "[W]e have some
websites available through our company where MTs can speak to each other.
So even though they're home alone they still have connection -- a real-time
connection. We also definitely recommend that they get out, they join a gym,
they take time out, go for walk, go meet a friend for lunch -- [that] they
try to incorporate some kind of social life, even though they are working
from home, so they don't isolate themselves."