How Much More Of This Are We Going To Take?
I recently came across a post on one of the online MT forums from an individual who has found herself in a financially challenging situation. Because she's a skilled, experienced transcriptionist, she's gets all the really difficult dictators that no one else can decipher. As a result, because she's paid on production, she's taking a substantial cut in compensation due to the added length of time it takes her to crank out the lines. Her employer tells her that she's "too valuable" in her present position to move her to a supervisory position.
"Too valuable?" I'm reminded of a line from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Princess Bride. One of the villains, Vizzini, played by familiar character actor Wallace Shawn, has an annoying habit of declaring that something is "inconceivable." Finally Inigo Montoya, one of Vizzini's henchmen, played by Mandy Patinkin, replies, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Or to (mis)quote another famous movie character, "My mama says ‘Valuable is as valuable does.'"
Somehow I don't think penalizing the most skilled practitioners of our craft is the best approach to retention and recruitment--but that's just me.
Yes, I know, everybody in the health care field is being squeezed financially and we all have to share the pain, etc., etc. But you know what? Some folks are feeling more than their fair share of the pain as a direct result of the behavior of others who evidently aren't feeling ENOUGH pain.
At the top of the food chain, at least as far as MTs are concerned, are the dictators. In my opinion, this is where the bulk of the responsibility for dictation-related outcomes--cost, turnaround time, and accuracy--should lie. I understand that doctors have their own pressures to deal with, but that's no excuse for producing indecipherable dictation. Poor dictating habits directly affect all three of the aforementioned factors, leading to higher costs, longer TAT, and inaccurate patient records. Yet somehow the responsibility for improving those factors has rolled downhill until now it's OUR job to make it all better!
Need to cut transcription costs? No problem, buy a speech recognition platform and cut your MTs' line rates in half. Want those reports back sooner? No problem, tell the MTs to work faster. Reports coming back full of errors? No problem, just add "risk management" to the MTs' job description and make THEM responsible if they don't catch all the dictators' mistakes.
What the heck??
Until dictators and the institutions who write their paychecks start feeling the pain themselves instead of passing the plate to the next pew, the working MT will continue to bear the brunt of the financial burden. And the only way the folks at the top of the food chain are going to get the message will be when working MTs get fed up and say, "Enough!" Not until that happens will the pressure wave will start to work its way back up the pipeline. Only when MTs refuse to suffer financially because they're "too valuable," or refuse to take a 50% pay cut for the privilege of working on a speech recognition platform that only produces a 25% increase in productivity, will MT service owners be forced to raise compensation in order to recruit and retain qualified practitioners. And the only way MTSOs will be able to pay their MTs more will be to submit contract bids that reflect the added cost of hiring skilled MTs to clean up crap dictation that--surprise, surprise!--the high-priced SR platforms couldn't decipher. Then and only then will the people paying the bills start to realize that, a) they've been sold a bill of goods by technology vendors, and b) they'll have to look elsewhere for ways to cut costs because those lowly MTs finally got their belly full.
Will this ever happen? I honestly don't know. CAN it happen? Absolutely! Working MTs have a lot more power than they realize, but they've been treated like the unwanted stepchildren of the health care profession so long that they've bought into the lie themselves.
In the movie Network, Peter Finch's character Howard Beale tells his viewers to "get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I'm as mad as h***, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'" How much more will it take for working MTs to get that message? If MTs don't get it, the folks further up the food chain never will.