I regret paying for school for this type of work - MLS Nuance Employee Review

- The pay is piece work and is extremely low. In the first 4 months I worked for them, I actually had my pay decreased when they implemented a new “easier” transcription platform. When I started we were paid 0.70 cents/per minute for voice recognition and 1.15 for typing. When the new systems came in, they decreased voice recognition to 0.57.5 cents/minute but typing stayed at 1.15; however, 99% of the transcription (on my account anyway) is voice recognition. Training on these accounts and platforms is unpaid with each sessions lasting usually 3 hours. There are no raises to earn and everyone gets paid on the same pay scale, meaning if you have 25 years of experience, you will be making the same amount per minute as someone who only has a couple months of experience. At this point, I would make more money working part-time at my local McDonald's. - Recently, they informed everyone that they will be switching our contracted minimum minutes per week from 300 to 400. For me, this would require working nearly 40 hours per week, making around 7.00 - 8.00/hr. I admit I am not the fastest editor, but I am definitely not the slowest either. On some days, I call them “lucky days”, you can get long dictations and easy dictators and get done very quickly, but I find these days are the exception. For the most part though, the dictations are very short, many under 30 seconds, which means I am literally making a couple of cents per job. I am required to “set up” the correct patient visit date, verify the name and add copies to other physicians, all of which takes precious time (especially when you are searching names of doctors you can't quite make out) and this affects how fast you can edit reports and therefore takes money out of your pocket. - You are required to maintain an accuracy of 98% or higher. I fortunately have not had the quality assurance problems I see a lot of people having. I do however want to stress that this is difficult. It is not uncommon to get dictators that are eating, walking around, flipping though charts or even talking to patients or other doctors while dictating. These take a lot of extra time to edit because the software just puts whatever it thinks the dictator is saying and most of the time it is just plain wrong. I am not sure if it's just me, but I have found that the VR (voice recognition) software actually has gotten worse at figuring out what is being said. When this software came in, we were told it was “the best of the best” and it would learn what the dictators were saying and it did, kind of, but with so many different dictators, accents and people editing, I think the software gets confused. I find now that sometimes it simply skips words or whole sentences and I am nearly retyping whole reports while still being paid the editing rate. - The supervisors and management do not see you as a person. I dread checking my emails on the weekends, because it's not uncommon to wake up to nasty emails telling everyone that they NEED to get on and work because the account is behind. This is probably one of my biggest problems with this company. It does not matter to them if you have hit your quota or surpassed it entirely, they are always pushing for MORE, MORE, MORE. The bottom line is I can't survive on the pay. Looking back, I would never have gone to school for this. Do not believe all of the information online stating transcriptonists can make $42,000/year from home. This, for the most part, is not the case! In-hospital jobs (which I had hoped to find) are very, very few and far between with most hospitals now outsourcing to companies like this. I would seriously advise anyone thinking about going to school for medical transcription to strongly consider something else entirely. I am disappointed to have wasted my time and money.