POUR OUT YOUR MIND IN ENGLISH

The need for good English in medical transcription
By Purple Flowers

If the call-center industry has an accent /English/communication trainer, the medical transcription industry has realized their need for one as well. As a BPO industry handling sensitive medical reports for clients based in the US, accurate transcription (grammar, spelling, and punctuation aside for medical knowledge) is also deemed necessary to keep the jobs coming in.

My becoming an English trainer in the medical transcription industry came a year ago when I was having that “what’s next feeling” after being in academe for more than 13 years. I answered an ad looking for an English teacher with call-center experience (yes, I had also tried my hands on that) on board to teach basic grammar to the company’s potential and existing workforce.

Needless to say, I jumped at that opportunity and realized how language competence can enhance your chances of nailing and staying on that job. The crowd that I met came from various educational backgrounds—from high-school graduates to licensed medical health professionals and practitioners, even non-medical professionals. Yes, name them and we have them. That’s how diverse the medical transcription workforce is.

When I came on board, only 10 percent of English training was being provided to them; the other 90 percent was on medical and computer training. This was based on the premise that the English this workforce learned in school would suffice to meet the industry’s needs. However, the varying language competency of the adult learners, their individual language issues, and the complexities of our “dictators” gave rise to more and more medical reports not meeting the clients' standards. So it was no wonder that “transcription accuracy” soon became an issue.

What makes it truly surprising is the fact that errors found in the report is not medical in nature but “simple, common sense English words,” as the client puts it.

It’s a different tune for the medical transcription industry, unlike in the call-center industry where cheat notes are available to follow during calls and a sensible adlib could easily be quipped in like a pro. In medical reports, the accuracy of the medical reports highly depends on how the medical language specialist has understood the (ESL) spoken or dictated text, and how it was translated to the written or transcribed text.

A weak foundation in basic grammar coupled with non-familiarity with the dictator’s accent and idiolects often result in medical reports categorized as “defective.” So the more defected reports churned out, the more monetary losses there will be for the company. This, in turn, eventually translates to losses in the potential source of income for the workforce.

These issues prompted the training team reassess their training platform. They eventually agreed to allocate more time for English training which, as they say, “could have been avoided in the first place” if only this aspect had been taken care of way back in school. (Ouch!)

Having had my baptism of fire, I’m now part of the medical transcription business sector. It is for this reason that I am making an earnest appeal to educators, teaching institutions, and those involved in teaching and training to make a collective effort in strengthening the language skills of our learners.

I wouldn’t say that I have gained mastery over English after the many years I’ve been teaching English. Like everyone else, I still have so many things to learn and so many flaws to correct, but one thing that really hit me hard is the realization that maybe—just maybe—our educators can see things from the industry’s point of view. Then perhaps they can sit down and come up collaboratively with a plan that can empower and train our learners to be linguistically competent and to be industry-ready.

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