Advocate for ... Greed
I suppose not many MTs have paid attention to AAMT's (yes, I know they're AIrHeaDs now) 3rd edition of their Book of Style because it came out virtually on the heels of the 2nd edition--which was not a great improvement over the 1st edition. Frankly, when Ellen Drake pulled out of the project, I saw no reason to bother. The BOS and various certification gimmicks are obviously the lifeblood for an organization that can't seem to figure out why MTs aren't flocking to join the official ranks--except in India, where MTs are still uninformed enough that they're falling for the notion that all this will buy them a cachet in a field that's paying them the equivalent of about Rs. 5000 (i.e. about $100) a month. (Let's not forget that AAMT also negotiated a deal with Prometrics wherein they get to take the certification test at cut-rate prices because they make less than we do--forget that their cost of living is obviously a fraction of ours and the fact they've already driven our wages and ability to support ourselves into the dumper.) Every time we shell out an increasing amount of money (currently $80 for the book alone), we still get something incredibly counterintuitive and unsearchable. Also, beginning with the latest edition, they have opted not to offer a CD version, claiming it's too difficult to create a workable electronic version. Forget that it's a small feat for anyone to convert the previous CD to a .pdf file, which far easier to navigate than the book or CD, and forget that they should actually have focused efforts at offering an online version (which they could actually amend and improve on the fly) all along. Nope, the old guard has never been terribly adept at keeping up with the times. The reversal on the CD version has been a puzzlement to me, though. Whereas it had previously been offered as both a companion or an alternative to the hard copy version of the reference--and the CD was proving to be increasingly popular with MTs, who found they could either turn it into a text file or simply leave the CD in their drive and save themselves fumbling through the book constantly--there was just something "off" about their claims that the new edition could only appear as a hard copy.
Aha. . . but now the light comes on. Enter Interfix--thanks to their "partnership with the experts at the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), InterFix has created the first application that sets universal health data quality standards and deploys them to the workstation level, integrating them into the document creation process"--who can now offer "a fully integrated standards-based knowledge base" for MTs via their can't-live-without-it BenchMark KB, wherein for a mere $199 a year, you get:
* Access to the complete medical reference library from Stedman’s in a single user interface.. (sic)
* A continuously updated national physician database (850,000+)
* Quality alerts library highlight common transcription style errors, including Join Commission dangerous abbreviations.
* AHDI Book of Style in searchable format
* Annual electronic membership to AHDI
* Integration with all popular transcription and EHR platforms
Hmm. . . Suddenly, it's not so impossible to offer that BOS in an electronic format, eh? Interesting.
I think this proves my point beyond a doubt that The Organization Formerly Known as AAMT--a "professional organization" representing American medical transcriptionists--has now fully embraced its true purpose as a shill for software firms. Clearly, the "fix" has been on for a long time in their partnership with developers and salesmen, and the plan is to virtually corner the market on not only MT resources, but standards--including, no doubt, lobbying pressure (which AAMT has so proudly focused on in recent years) to attempt to make their credentials (for not only MTs, but MTSOs and schools) required and their products the default for transcription platforms and EMRs.
AAMT is officially dead and I challenge them to simply 'fess up and admit they're working against us. Those of you yet to find your lifeboats might want to form a line on the left. For those of you still in need of a style reference, I once again recommend heartily the totally free and infinitely more useful MT Reference Style Guide, created and maintained by MTs for MTs, and gee, whaddya know--easily searchable online.