Pros
Working from home. Almost affordable benefits. Having a job.
Cons
Working from home. They call and call and email and IM because they want me to give up my days off and sleep to sign back on and bail them out when jobs are about to go out of TAT (turn around time), which is how they make their money. For months and months there was not enough work and I was off more than I was on. Then came the MetrX system of calculating pay. I did not know from one week to the next how much I would make. The whole $10/hr for training was a bait and switch. When you start out, after the first training days when you're paid $10/hr, everything goes through QC (quality control). When jobs go through QC you are docked for percentage of jobs that go to QC (100% for the first week or two) and pay rate is 7 cents a line. Try to make more than $10/hr on that. When DSP (direct send protocol) status is reached, you can make money -- if you can figure out how they count everything. The statistics I pulled up on their software showed I was typing/editing more than 300 lines per hour, but my line count was more like 100-175 per hour when it came back at the end of the week. WHAT!? What happened to over 300 lines per hour? Oh, they count that against the time clock instead of the machine time (time actually typing/editing on their programs). Oh, but you don't measure accuracy the same way. Accuracy is measured against the time clock and not the machine time. The time on the clock are the hours of your scheduled shift (if you don't run out of work first). They select 5-15 jobs per week (that takes a big hit when you're out of work most of the week) and the errors are taken against that small sample of work instead of against the 5000-10,000 lines you have typed in the week -- on a good week. The percentages are completely upside down. For instance, if the voice recognition program screws up a report (and often the pretyped version does not resemble the finished report once it has been edited) and you have to retype the whole thing, it is still paid at half the rate (8 cents a line when they're done deducting points and accuracy percentages). Points are supposed to go 0.25 for a minor error, 1 point for a major error, and 3 points for a critical error (patient safety issue). What really happens is that those points, usually the major and critical errors, are counted much higher (sometimes 5-10 points) when measured against the number of lines in the report. Fewer lines means more points. How's that for accurate statistical data? Everything about their system is geared to paying the transcriptionist as little as possible while they are employed. Medical transcription has always been a feast or famine situation, but at least we were paid a base rate that reflected our years of experience and accuracy and not this weighted for failure system now in place. Jobs that are typed during a 2nd or 3rd shift should be paid with a shift differential, but start a job during your later shift and if the send goes 1 minute over the time (based on Eastern Standard Time) and you lose the shift differential. There are no holidays unless PTO (Paid time off) is used and vacations are given up. One week vacation at the end of the first year and no matter how long you have worked for NTS you will get no more than 14 days of vacation/PTO time. Yes, they do have benefits, but it will cost you, probably less than smaller companies, but it is a sad sight when paychecks are deposited and 35% of the gross pay is taken in taxes and benefit costs after they are done gutting the pay with their MetrX statistical program. It would take an accountant to decode their pay system.
