Med Workshops' Medical Transcription Training Blog

During, the first two weeks of an internship, the day’s dictation is generally short. You are given just one to three files to type. Depending on your skill level, this should take a few hours a day.  You listen to your dictation files, type them, and then listen again as you are proofreading. If you have questions while typing you would email your mentor/proofreader.
 
As you proceed, you will be given more files, but generally no more than six as your mentor must also listen to the files while she is proofreading your work and it is very time consuming for you. By the end of Mentored Internship you will have up to 10 files or so per day.  Depending on your aptitude, this will take six to eight hours a day, approximately.
 
Most Medical Transcription Companies assign internship work between 7 and 10 a.m. and you can work on them as you choose during the day or evening.  Usually, your work must be uploaded onto the server at least by the early A.M.  Therefore you have 10 hours in which to do your typing depending on your time zone. This is Monday through Friday. You are not assigned intern typing on the weekends. The intern will get faster at this but will also get more minutes as she/he improves so that she will be ready to do 60 to 80 minutes of work at the end of Mentored Internship.
 
After you finish your internship and are hired, newbies usually start out with what amounts to part-time transcription to type.  As a newbie you will be assigned less than a fully experienced MT. 
 
As an example: experienced MTs will transcribe 60 to 80 minutes of clinic dictation in about four hours.  Full time is approximately 120 minutes of clinic dictation per day depending on difficulty.  Of course the amount varies day-to-day, but this is the standard for clinic work which is where almost all newbies start.

You should strive for quality from the very start (thus the long hours) and as your skill level increases the time needed to type will dramatically decrease.  If you don’t put in the time now to be good at this, you will always struggle. This is what makes the difference between a good MT and merely an ok MT.

We hope this helps newbies understand the internship process a little better!

Medical Transcription Internship is Absolutely Essential and Employers know this.

Scientific study by CAT scan and other tools, reveal that most of our knowledge comes from hands-on experience and not from book learning.  We all understand the difference between book smart and street smart.  When we only learn by book study we don’t acquire understanding that the complete use of our mind and senses can provide.  Our minds gain deep knowledge best when we actually do something as opposed to just reading about it.  An example would be reading a road map as opposed to actually driving the route.

The importance of Internship

Studies of the mind show that practical experience is the best teacher.  We can think of memory as explicit and implicit. This comes from an excellent book by Eric Jensen, “Teaching with the Brain in Mind”.  Jensen points out that students taught by data-dumping methods rarely retain their knowledge for long without some explicit use (hands on as in apprenticeship or internship).  Our minds need something more than facts to bond with the knowledge.  This is why handouts and impromptu quizzes can be valuable supplements.  But more importantly, we need the age-old method of apprenticeship to engage sensory bonds that will last!

As an example, I could read several books on drawing blood and get an A on my tests, but would you like to be my 1st patient?  Would you like to be my 5th patient?  Jensen points out that the mind has an unlimited capacity to learn and retain knowledge through hands-on, personal experience, but very limited ability when the information comes to us second hand through books or lectures!  An amazing discovery, but not unexpected.

This is why Medical Transcription students truly prosper when they receive real-life,  hands-on experience with internship.  And it is why employers are very reluctant to trust anyone who has no real-world experience in this field.

History often repeats itself because we forget what those before us had learned.  Many schools today have forgotten or refuse to provide all of the learning skills necessary for a sound education and their graduates suffer.  Medical Transcription Internship is absolutely essential and MT employers know this.