Medical Trancriptionist Job Outlook - Medical Trancription
Job Service Future
Job opportunities will be good. Employment
of medical transcriptionist services is projected to grow faster than the average
for all occupations
through 2012. Demand for medical transcription services will be spurred
by a growing and aging population. Older age groups receive proportionately
greater numbers of medical tests, treatments, and procedures that
require documentation. A high level of demand for transcription services
also will be sustained by the continued need for electronic documentation
that can be easily shared among providers, third-party payers, regulators,
and consumers. Growing numbers of medical transcriptionist services will
be needed to amend patients’ records, edit for grammar, and
identify discrepancies in medical records.
Contracting out transcription
work overseas and advancements in speech recognition technology are
not expected to significantly reduce the
need for well-trained medical transcriptionist services domestically. Contracting
out transcription work abroad—to countries such as India—has
grown more popular as transmitting confidential health information
over the Internet has become more secure; however, the demand for overseas
transcription services is expected to supplement the demand for well-trained
domestic medical transcriptionist services. Speech-recognition technology allows
physicians and other health professionals to dictate medical reports
to a computer that immediately creates an electronic document. In spite
of the advances in this technology, it has been difficult for the software
to grasp and analyze the human voice and the English language with
all its diversity. As a result, there will continue to be a need for
skilled medical transcriptionist services to identify and appropriately edit
the inevitable errors created by speech recognition systems, and create
a final document.
Hospitals will continue to employ a large percentage of medical transcriptionist services,
but job growth there will not be as fast as in other industries. Increasing
demand for standardized records should result in rapid employment growth
in offices of physicians or other health practitioners, especially
in large group practices.
>Next
Topic: Medical Transcriptionist Salary