Increasing Medical Transcription WagesAre you happy with your medical transcription wages? If you're like me, the answer is always "no"! Let's explore all the various tips and techniques that you can utilize to increase your typing efficiency and thus increase the bottom line - i.e. your paycheck. First of all, let's start with your eating and sleeping habits. You will increase your medical transcription wages if you get the proper amount of sleep. Let me say that again another way - you WILL make more money if you get the proper amount of sleep! It seems so simple as to seem almost simplistic, doesn't it? But, if you are tired and/or sleepy, you cannot maintain adequate concentration and energy to pound out those medical reports. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about lack of sleep - your child is sick, you're not feeling well, the neighbor's dog was barking all night. But it helps to be aware of this and realize your production is going to suffer because you have to slow down to avoid making mistakes. While you're typing away in a gray fog and all you can think about is when you can take a nap, all of the hundreds (if not thousands) of little details that come with medical transcribing will suddenly escape you and your typing efficiency will suffer.
So if you're serious about making a decent medical transcription salary, you'll make sure to be well rested. You also need to make sure you keep your blood sugar steady. Sugar and caffeine are great - I'll be the first to admit it! But make sure you eat real food regularly, preferably small meals 4 or 5 times a day, to keep energy supplied to your brain. There's a great book by Jonny Bowden, PhD, called The 150 Most Effective Ways to Boost Your Energy which you can read about at www.jonnybowden.com or buy at your local bookstore. He defines the correlation between your energy level (and health) and your brain function clearly and in much more depth than I'm able to go into here. Next, you can increase your medical transcription wages by remembering to keep life's little distractions to a minimum. Each company or account that you work for (depending on whether you are an employee or an independent contractor) will have their own specific requirements for turnaround time and/or daily line requirements. You need to make sure you honor these commitments by keeping in mind that you are a professional medical transcriptionist. No, there isn't anything you can do about the toilet flooding or sick children or any of the myriad of real emergencies that we all have to deal with. But allowing phone calls or web browsing or solitaire or ebay or financial problems or any other of a thousand possible distractions to constantly interrupt you during the day WILL drastically reduce your typing efficiency and thus your medical transcription wages. And our goal here is to your income, right? So buckle down, ignore the outside world, and make some money! Another good work habit to develop in order to increase your typing efficiency is regular breaks. For instance, you can work steadily, with no distractions, for 55 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. It is a whole lot easier to break the land-speed typing record if you know that in less than an hour you can get up and stretch or turn cartwheels or use the restroom or get something to eat. Most of the really productive medical transcriptionists that I know have this habit. Next, to continue our discussion on medical transcription salaries, we are going to take a look at choosing word expander software, also called text expanders, to skyrocket your productivity. Ready? Let's go! Part 2 -
Choosing word expander software
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