What Is Medical Transcription?

  In recent years the medical field has been going to great lengths to provide ways for doctors to spend more quality time with their patients and less time doing paperwork and updating files. To hone in on this problem the medical transcription profession was created. Medical transcriptionists, MTs, originally served as secretaries to medical professionals who dictated detailed patient information. The MTs in turn spent hours retyping the dictation on typewriters in order to document
it in the patients’ permanent files. Over the years, however, there has been an abundance of modern technology created to make the MT’s job easier and more accurate. Typewriters have been replaced with high-tech analog recorders and phone diction systems that allow medical professionals to dictate what they want included in the records. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, doctors can dictate patient histories, operation reports, autopsy reports,

progress notes, referral letters, and other documents for MTs to transcribe. After the dictation process is complete, the (data entry) medical transcriptionists listen to the information and write everything in a clear and grammatically correct fashion, making the files easier to read and understand. The MTs then send the document back to the professional who dictated it to review and revise the document before signing off for its completion. After this process is complete, the final revised copy will become part of the patient’s permanent record.