Work @ Home

With several transcription companies setting up their base in India, medical transcription has become a lucrative and feasible option for those looking for home-based careers

Vatsala Bhatt, a nutritionist in a well-known health club in Bangalore, quit her job two years ago when she had a baby. Unable to move out, she started looking for a home-based career. She found the perfect option - medical transcription.

It worked out well for Vatsala, who now works for about six hours at home and makes Rs 10,000 per month or so. She also gets time to spend with her daughter.

Vatsala is one among the many who discovered the comfort of working from home and be independent. Until recently home-based medical transcription was popular only among US based home transcriptionists. Now it's slowly gaining a foothold in India. That's good news for people who are compelled to work from home, either for health or for family reasons, and also for people who are looking at a second job to supplement their income.

The system here works on two models. In some companies, which offer 'work-from-home' opportunities transcriptionists can opt to work out of home once they have reached the required level of proficiency.

What is medical transcription?

Medical transcription is the process where one accurately and swiftly transcribes medical records dictated by doctors and others, including history and physical reports, clinic notes, office notes, operative reports, consultation notes, discharge summaries, letters, psychiatric evaluations, laboratory reports, x-ray reports and pathology reports.

It involves receiving dictation by tape, digital system or voice file, and using earphones, a foot pedal for start-stop control and a word processing program. It sometimes includes the use of a printer and sometimes a modem. A variety of word-processing systems are used. It requires good listening and language skills, computer skills and knowledge of medical terms.

Read this FAQ for more information

It makes a lot of sense for companies to allow employees to work from home. According to Sreekumar, programme co-ordinator of Spryance, "Greater quality control is possible with home transcriptionists." Boston based Spryance set shop in India in 2000 with the prime intention of promoting home-based transcription.

Acusis is a Pittsburgh based medical transcription company and has recently opened three offices in Bangalore, Mysore and Chennai. They offer home-based transcription work and so far have hired more than 150 home transcriptionists (mostly women) in the three cities. According to the CEO of Acusis, David Iwenski, India was selected to set up their business because of the country's high literacy rate and excellent English language skills.

Acusis has their own software called Acusuite, which allows the candidate to access an encrypted platform to download the .wav files (audio files) and then upload Word files. The software also contains dictionary and glossary of medical terms along with an error-checking module.

Companies like Spryance (Mumbai) and iQ infotech (Chennai) also work in the same way. However, they have no company-specific software. Candidates are simply given user name and password that allows them to access files from the company site. A team of in-house transcriptionists monitors the work of home-based transcriptionists to weed out possible errors.

Home transcriptionists are allowed to retain files for a maximum of six hours from the time of download. The editing starts as soon as they upload the files. It is very important to stick to deadlines. In case of sudden problems, like power failure, most companies allow the transcriptionist to work from their offices.

Says Radha Sridhar, a medical transcriptionist in Bangalore, who opted to work from home after her marriage: "I download my files at about 7 am and start work at 8.30 am after my husband leaves for work. I upload the files by 3:00 pm."

Payment

Transcriptionists who work from home are paid on the basis of speed and accuracy. The pay ranges from 60 paisa to Rs.1.25 per line depending on the accuracy.

Radha says she now earns about Rs. 20,000 a month; more than what she used to earn earlier. "When I worked from office, I used to get a monthly salary. Now I am paid per line."

Once you have honed your listening skills to hit 99-100 per cent accuracy level, you can reach the editor stage, with higher pays and less tedious work. Companies like Spryance already employ home-based editors.

According to Nasscom, medical transcription is projected as the India's fourth largest foreign exchange earners in about five years. If the figures are to be believed, medical transcription will employ more than 50,000 people by 2008. Very good news for people looking out for flexible home-based careers.

Politics & the Cows

Socialism
You have two cows - you give one to your neighbor

Communism
You have two cows - the government takes them both and gives you the milk

Fascism
You have two cows - the government takes both and sells you the milk

Nazism
You have two cows - the government takes both and shoots you.

Capitalism
You have two cows - you sell one and buy a bull.

Trade Union
You have two cows - they take them from you shoot one and milk the other and throw the milk away.

Moral
Don't have anything to do with cows they only bring you trouble.

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Resume Writing - Do's & Dont's

The very important thing while preparing a resume is to invest your own time. Don’t just give an excuse that your resume is not good because you are not finding time to prepare it properly or update it.

Personal Section:

• Don’t mention multiple email ids. It creates confusion during communication.
• Don’t mention office email id. It shows you are spending office time and resources for personal activities.
• No multiple mobile phone numbers. If mentioned please put the timings for each number or mention the reason like local/outstation number.
• Some people omit the residential address, but it is important for the HR in order to generate the offer letter using this address. Also it gives impression that you are trying to hide something.

Objective Section:

Use objective section only if you are serious about your objective. Most of the people just copy the objective from some standard templates or from friend’s CV and don’t have any clue whether it really reflects his/her own objective.

Summary Section:

Understand that this is not an answer paper in an exam where you need to fill tons of pages just by writing the same sentence in different ways. For e.g below is the copy of two points from a CV. I don’t understand what these two lines mean !!!

• Experience in working on the Internet related technologies such as HTML, XML.
• Done extensive coding with XML, HTML, and JavaScript.

Skills Section:

Don’t include all the skills which you have come across in your college days or in your project which you have not worked on. This is useful just to get an interview call but not to fetch a job.

Group the skills in a proper manner. Incorrect grouping will put you in trouble during interview.

Project Details Section:

Project Description:
Be precise and short while putting project description. Don’t write pages of information here.

Start and End Dates:
Not mentioning this will leave an impression that you are trying to hide something.

Roles and Responsibilities:
This is the most important section which every interviewer see and would like to know more information. So, don’t just mention your responsibilities as design, development coding, testing etc.

Instead, mention the modules/features that are designed, developed, tested and the technologies used like


Modified, module A’s design to increase its performance by 50%.
Module A is modified to handle multiple requests simultaneously.
Developed connectivity between module A and B using so and so technology.

Project Achievements:
You can mention your individual or teams achievements and the awards received for this project from top management and customers.


General Achievements

Do mention your achievements irrespective of whether it is small or big right from your school days. Leave the judgment to the employer to decide how big or how important that achievement is for. Also you need to make a judgment on what type of achievements to include based on your experience level and based on the kind of job you are looking at.

Hobbies

Although I see this section mostly in fresher’s CVs, it would be useful to mention in experienced people’s CVs also only if you are serious about this hobby. Most of the experts strictly say not to mention hobbies, it is just my personal thought. I would look at a person with Trekking as his hobby might be a good team player and having a good risk taking and leadership abilities. Similarly a person with advanced level of chess might be good in analysis, impact analysis, strategic thinking.


Quality

Spelling mistakes – Avoid these. It shows you are not serious.

Fonts - Maintain consistency in fonts and their sizes across. Don’t try to use too many fonts. Don’t try to use too small or bigger fonts for normal text.

Skills - Mention skills in proper case. Don’t write HTML as Html, html.

Spacing and layout - Use tabs to insert spaces instead of multiple space bars. Make sure proper page breaks are inserted.

Always save the document with default view as “Print Layout” and with 100% zoom. In other layouts there are chances of missing some information like “Headers and Footers" are not visible in normal layout.

Try to open the resume in multiple systems and see the spacing and layout is preserved.

Proper Ordering:
Employer looks at information which is relevant for the current job. So, order your section properly based on the importance. Always put the project details in the reverse chronological order.

Project Description:
Don't mention any obvious things like "Designed the application as per client request".

It is better to avoid words like "duties include" and "responsibilities include". Employers would like to know what you have done instead of what duties or responsibilities given to you.

Don't be lazy to update your old project descriptions which contain sentences like "Working on improving the performance of module A".

Style:
I see most of the people resumes in a typical format which is quite boring like my blog. :-). You need to showcase your creative skills or your individual thinking style by putting your own format. It should be like your wedding card (Don't try to use the Calligraphy fonts used in the cards). The effort you put to make it different from other cards is required here also. You should give a feeling to the reader that you stand apart from the crowd and increase your chances of easily getting picked.

Fonts:
Use the fonts which are available by default on all systems like Arial, Times, Verdana etc. This will avoid displaying special ??? characters, if a particular font is not found in the Employer's system.

Spelling and Grammar:
In the last article it was mentioned to do a spell check. Also, review it once again or give it to others to proof read it. Look out for similar sounding words like Weak | Week, prospective | perspective.

Format: Text / RTF / Word / PDF?
Most of the HRs, recruiters do prefer Word than any other format. On the presentation front Word and PDF wins over Text and RTF formats. For recruiters, Word is the preferred format. Since they generally remove the contact information from the resume, it is convenient from them to do it in Word. You can use PDF if you are directly sending it HR of a company.