Medical transcription is like nothing else you ll ever experience. Doctors see patients in hospitals, clinics and physicians offices and dictate important information about the patient s history, physical examination, diseases, procedures, laboratory tests and diagnoses. This is absolutely NOT how doctors dictate. They expect the medical transcriptionist to do the formatting, the spelling, and to convert that dictated material from the doctor s shorthand medical slang to formal medical language.
Doctors often say things in their dictation that they never intend to be transcribed.
They also often begin and end by saying hello, goodbye, thank you, and have a nice holiday. They don't intend for this to be transcribed. The job of the medical transcriptionist is to figure out what is supposed to be part of the report and what is not. We are not robots who simply repeat everything we hear. We use judgement in deciding what to include and what not to include.