I suspect I'm channeling that lumpy old recliner with the floppy footrest that's been retired to the frat house. After surviving my work week last Thursday and with my A&P course deadline screeching up at full speed, I hit the books hard. Spent over 36 hours solid (yes, I napped a couple hours here and there) reviewing everything--the ...

I've heard and read the horror stories: the physician who dictates from her child's swim practice, the doc who treats MTs to his hacking cough, the PA who insists on scarfing a Big Mac while telling MTs about a patient.

I recently finished an article on dictation practices for our May 19 issue, and let me tell you--it's certainly an issue MTs are passionate about. The article focused more on the ways that ...

The month of May is filled with graduations, weddings, and proms. This is also the time of year in which mothers everywhere dare to dream of a Mother's Day gift they will actually love.  Of course as a mother of two, I will mark the occasion with the annual Mother's Day dinner and swoon over handmade cards and gifts from my kids.  I will pray that they talk my husband into just getting me a gift card at ...

My brain and my back are having an argument about which can give out on me first and after almost a two-week battle, there's still no clear winner.

After three months of study, I'm nearing crunch time on my first CTR course and I suspect the stress has simply gotten to me. Oddly enough, I sailed through school in my younger days effortlessly--rarely cracked a book, rarely bothered with homework (I was usually ...

I was thumbing through the Charlotte Observer and came across an article that caught my eye. The article is called, "Physicians slow to join e-mail universe." I remember how I hated e-mail and avoided it as much as possible. I preferred to talk face to face with a person. Communicating by e-mail seemed impersonal and ...

Ahhh, the internet is a wonderful thing. As a relative newcomer to transcription (i.e. I learned my job on a computer instead of a Selectric and never had to pay my dues in triplicate with carbon paper and Liquid Paper), I can't imagine doing this job without the web. As a book lover, I know there's nothing like a hard copy to validate an obscure term, but have to admit it's been ages since I've cracked that tower ...

After spending twenty years in the health information field, I longed to do something different with my professional life. I was working in a job that I hated as an HIM director and felt that I was not using the skills that I had developed over the years. I dreaded going to work every day and counted the minutes until quitting time. I became a "clock watcher." The clock watcher is a person that watches the ...

The saga actually began last spring, when a tabloid ran an exclusive story about Farrah Fawcett's cancer returning. Shortly after UCLA doctors told Fawcett that her ...

"The whole point of the medical record is to give accurate, readable information about the patient. There are many shortcuts ...

When we learn to do transcription, one of the key things we need to learn is the various abbreviations and acronyms for things. Sometimes, they have more than one possible expansion (like CVA can mean both cerebrovascular accident and costovertebral angle) and in certain parts of a report (i.e. the diagnoses), you generally need to expand those. You also get the lovely Latin abbreviations ...

As a tantalizing clue as to my decrepitude, I have vague recollections of life before color TV. For some reason, my family was slow to embrace new technology (which probably explains my geeky obsession with Everything New) and I spent a good deal of my formative years viewing the world in black and white. I remember particularly the night we crossed the street to watch The Wizard of Oz on our friends' new ...

Well, whaddya know. . . I may have missed my calling here. I've been so focused on what makes a good or bad MT course and trying to move upward and onward into CTR that I totally neglected other possibilities. Those of us who've been around any length of time at all know that the world (and particularly, the internet) is full of bogus courses that will promise to train you as transcriptionist in 12 easy lessons and ...

I've been watching the various online forums with a new eye since embarking on my journey to a new career and I think it's done nothing but bolster my jaded view of the MT world.

In the Advance forums, Lisa Algeo asks for feedback on bad transcription or coding schools--which has almost entirely ...

Yesterday, Google announced ...

That's how many hours a day I figure I need in order to deal with everything on my plate at the moment. I suspect the problem is exacerbated when you work a graveyard shift. It seems like I'm forever working, sleeping, working, sleeping, working, sleepy, or just allowing myself a couple hours in the evening to veg in front of the TV with an easy dinner. Come the weekend, I still need to get groceries into the house ...

There are many reasons to pre-test (you can read them all here), but in short ...

The physicians have never seen anything like it, according to the Los Angeles Times. A letter crossed the desks of California doctors that's led to outrage among the state's health care providers.

Help us out, asks the letter (warning: ...

Have you ever bought something that you need to assemble, then found the instruction booklet was some weirdly skimpy diagram that didn't look anything like the parts before you--and the instructions were all in a foreign language? That's how I felt when I tried to find out what cancer registry was and how to get into it. Based on a couple comments here and there I was intrigued, but even my Google skills weren't proving ...