Nuance reviews

The entire company was a challenge! This company expected the medical transcriptionists to constantly maintain a 100% accuracy on each and every single report. While I truly cared about the patients and their safety, truly took my job seriously, I did manage, a few times, to reach a 100% accuracy rate; however, human perfection is impossible, and I stayed for the most part in the 99.8 - 99.5 percent range. As I could not maintain the 100%, I had taken this personally, feeling a failure, losing faith in myself and my abilities. I was in a constant state of stress, duress, depression, anxiety, beating myself up daily. In the effort to try to maintain perfection, I failed to keep up my production. This failure at production caused me to receive what this company calls "MUP," makeup pay. This meant I was not producing enough to even meet the minimum wage requirement. So, the company had to "make up" my pay in order to meet the minimum wage requirement. Prior to working for this company, I had been employed by an incredible MTSO,where my yearly income was at least $40,000!! At Nuance, my yearly plummeted to a whopping $17,000! You are probably asking why am I not with the prior MTSO. Well this incredible company eliminated our jobs! I want you to understand the $40,000 yearly was ENTIRELY earned by literally TYPING!! Straight typing, NONVETBATIM!! Current or former company: Voice recognition. Voice recognition or VR is completely ridiculous waste of time and accuracy. I could actually type a report with excellent accuracy and get it out much faster than VR. When an MT types dictation for a patient, from the beginning, the MT is extremely involved in the patient "story." With VR, it's like jumping into the middle of a book. I am absolutely against VR and will tell you I HATE it! When you are completely involved in a story an MT has absolute control and by being involved an MT is 100% more likely to catch and prevent errors. We are told physicians do not like to dictate, that VR for some reason is much easier for them. Well, they should try transcribing a report. MTs actually help a doctor look great, competent, etc. Another "con" and a complete turn about — remember I told you our medical records are outsourced? They are outsourced to India! Guess who performs quality control of the MTs report? Yep! People in India! So, I have a nonspeaking English QA person judging and correcting my reports! How is it possible an "English as s second language" or ESL, can understand English well enough to catch errors? It's difficult for an MT to transcribe ESLs, but we know our language! My husband finally had enough of my suffering. My suffering, duress, depression, constant fear affected my ENTIRE FAMILY! I'm out for good after 20+ years' experience. I'd devoted 20+ years of my life constantly learning, improving, studying on my time, literally put everything I had into my profession — all for naught … Thanks Nuance for ruining my life. Good riddance.

I know from experience that questioning/complaining of the validity and fairness of audits (especially if one was just learning a new account and should be allowed a grace period before an official audit that could count against you was performed) was met with another immediate vindictive bad audit by QA of your work, both audits of which could be used against you to decrease wages on next paycheck. My advice to anyone thinking about going into the MT field is DO NOT DO IT. I want no more to do with the field. I know of no other job industry in this country that devalues its employees more by devaluing their education, experience and most of all self-esteem by refusing to pay an hourly wage or salary and finding ways to deduct pay for every little tiny error, even if the error is a dictator error or an error that does not affect the overall safety of the report. The fast food places don't deduct your pay and/or send you threatening emails because you accidentally gave someone a vanilla shake instead of a chocolate one. A teacher does not get penalized because he/she did not grade a certain number of papers in an hour. A clerk in a clothing store does not get a paycheck deduction because he/she forgot to give you the sale price on a pair of pants. Think of all the instances physicians make mistakes in operations; maybe they get sued but still go on their merry way by just transferring to another hospital or just switching over to a high paid professorship in a medical school. What about all the politicians who screw up, do most of them suffer any kind of retribution . . . nah, they just give themselves pay raises in Congress. No other job in the world expects 99% accuracy except medical transcription. No other job puts the ridiculous stress and expectations on the shoulders of its employees and makes them scapegoats even for doctor errors than the medical transcription field. No other job tracks your production and is ready to pounce on its employees for being one line per hour under in production. However, if you like making less than $20,000 a year for a full-time job that wants to hire employees with education and experience and certification and seeks to find ways that no other career field does to dock pay and sets unrealistically high expectations of accuracy and lines per hour processed, even if the dictator has problems with the English language or is an American dictator who mumbles and really has no excuse for poorly dictating a report; if you like constantly being switched to new accounts right when your production finally starts going up and you start to get the hang of the new account rules/site profile only to have to start all over on a new account and thus have your production knocked down for several months; if you like the feeling that your job is dead end with no chance of advancement; if you like never getting a pay raise; if you like getting threatening emails for every little mistake made; if you like feeling constantly demeaned, shamed and humiliated and unable to make a monthly budget because you never know what you're getting paid from week to week since you are getting paid on production and might get your pay deducted that month for some unpredictable reason, then by all means enlist in the treachery of medical transcription! To all the MTs struggling, feeling stuck in a job rut, questioning their own validity and talents, and like many at this point in their transcription lives are staying in the field only so they can work at home – STOP IT. Think about what you're doing to yourself. How ever you got yourself into transcription, you have the power to find your way out. For career ideas, search on the internet, go to the bookstore or library and read up, check out local vocational schools and colleges in your area, go to local business and see if someone is available to talk to you about their career and see if you can even trail that person for a few hours on their job, think of all the other areas of the medical field or in other fields that you could apply your skills. Even if you temporarily find yourself working fast food while embarking on your new career search – well at least you’ll be getting a consistent hourly wage – one better than you got doing transcription. Even if you’re not sure if your job skills are relevant to a certain field, go apply for a job opening anyway. After what we’ve been through in the MT field, what do we have to lose . . . really . . . at this point. . . working for an industry that for some odd reason is totally unregulated and will never ever treat you any better because they feel they do not have to. Either the government is not aware of some loop hole that the transcription field is taking advantage of in regards to the horrendous treatment of its workers or there must be a cargo of transcription lobbyists swarming to Washington. As far as I am concerned, go ahead and keep shoving the jobs across the seas to a bunch of people who barely know English and have an even less chance of being able to interpret the garbage we all hear on our headphones. Let’s see how well they do with listening to the constant rude belching, eating, smacking, chomping, unprofessional unabashed flirting and giggling going on between the dictating doctor and some other mysterious voice in the background, the background noises of beeping machines and all the arguing and griping amongst doctors and nurses in the background. Let’s see how much our overseas counterparts enjoy hearing the endless stuttering of an ESL dictator who is struggling through a whole long report trying to find the English equivalents of long medical words and phrases. Let’s see how well our overseas counterparts do when they feel obligated to listen to a badly dictated report all over again to fill in the swiss-cheese style mess of holes because they worry about being penalized for leaving too many blanks, only to realize in the end they could not fill in many blanks and their production for their work shift just took a nosedive. Maybe then, the transcription industry will understand a special saying that a teacher I had growing up used to reiterate, "those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it." If the overseas quality is forever crappy, maybe then these jerky transcription owners will decide to send the work back home. Except by then, maybe they will have trouble finding any MTs who want to crawl back to them. As far as we MT's go, let us stop repeating the past, learn from it, and value ourselves better. If you're sick of feeling like crap by this industry, take control because nobody is going to do it for you. Show this industry you don't need them and find something more stimulating and emotionally, intellectually and spiritually fulfilling and rewarding than processing day after day after day gobs and gobs of reports crammed with complicated medical information for people who will never appreciate what you do! Good luck to all MTs! We need to stand as one. Down with medical transcription!!