The Speech Rec Results
Well, the
2008 ADVANCE Salary Survey results are in. Thanks to a bit of outsourcing on
ADVANCE's part, I had a new survey tool to play with, and I had fun sifting through the data and really trying to get to the bottom of what HIM professionals are making. Thanks also goes out to the readers who filled out the survey. We had nearly 3,600 take part in the survey, giving us a good number to work with to bring you results that I feel confident in.
Because the PDF documents that we put together on salaries are a bit cumbersome (we had a lot of data and this seemed the best way to present all of it to you), I'd like to quit being a slacker in the blog writing department by picking out a few specific results and looking at them in more detail here at ADVANCE Perspectives: HIM.
First up, I wanted to look at the results for MTs who do speech recognition editing vs. those who do some or no editing. We often hear about pay cuts for those MTs who are moving to speech recognition, and I put a few choices specifically geared toward that thought in the job responsibilities question when I made the survey with the hopes of seeing how the salaries would stack up.
Keep in mind that there are a ton of job responsibilities in HIM, and honestly, I'm sure I didn't even scratch the surface with the survey. I lumped the speech recognition question in with all HIM job responsibilities with the hopes of shaking out some decent data.
Respondents could choose more than one answer. Because I ended up with a 110 percent response rate from full-time MTs/editors, it seems that some people did choose more than one, which I can sort of understand. Maybe they do more than just some editing, and wanted to pick some editing along with all editing. MTs/editors also might work for more than one company, and that could be another explanation, if one company does straight transcription while another does all speech recognition. I can also see how it might be confusing--if you do some editing, then you also have a job responsibility to do SR editing, and a responsibility to do transcription, and you might click on all three. I'll try to figure out how to solve this issue for next year's survey.
At any rate, the responses didn't shake out as perfectly as I'd hoped because I wasn't anticipating that anyone would choose more than one answer. That ends my disclaimer; now on to the results.
The 16 percent of full-time MTs/editors who listed a primary job responsibility as "medical transcription--speech recognition editor" brought in an average of $34,600, according to our survey. Those who listed a primary job responsibility as "medical transcription--some speech recognition editing" (25 percent) reported making an average of $31,400, and the 69 percent of full-time MTs who don't work with speech rec at all averaged $33,000.
Basically, those who seem to be bouncing back and forth between SR and transcription made the least, and accounted for a quarter of all full-time MTs/editors, according to our survey. Editors made the most, and those who do transcription fell into the middle.
I have my theories, but I'd rather hear from people working in the industry. What has your experience been with SR and how does it differ/how is it similar? Do you agree with the averages we ended up with from the survey? I'm also open to suggestions on the salary survey as a whole, so send those my way. If you don't want to comment below, e-mail me at
ljusinski@advanceweb.com.