Medical Transcription and the Digital Foot Pedal
Your medical transcription course will come with a USB Digital Foot Pedal.
A digital foot pedal is necessary to work as a medical transcriptionist!
It will hook up to your computer through a USB port. The pedal will communicate with the transcription software. When you are listening to the digital dictations, there are times that you will need to pause, rewind or fast forward the voice file. You can do this with the digital foot pedal. Using the digital pedal with your foot allows you to keep your hands free to continue typing the medical report.
Most medical transcription courses include dictation on CDs. Dictation on CDs is known as digital dictations. There are some courses that still do have dictations on analog (cassette) tapes. There are very few doctors who still use analog (cassette) tapes. Most doctors dictate into a digital recorder that produces the digital dictations for the medical transcriber to listen to and transcribe into medical reports.
Some small, local transcription services may still use tapes, but most substantial companies have long since switched to be digital as mentioned above. If you have a MAC Computer instead of a PC, you will need to find out if the transcriber works with your computer before investing in any of the materials or transcriber machine.
Many transcription services are becoming impatient with new MTs, who only know how to use the old analog transcribers and are saying, "If you don't know digital, don't apply here."
You need high-quality digital equipment if you're going to work in today's market. We prefer you to train using the same tools you'll use on the job; this is why we include a digital foot pedal with the course.
This isn't a software program on a CD, but a full featured, professional digital foot pedal. This foot pedal can be used with the most popular transcription software such as Express Scribe. You can download the software for the foot pedal from our student area.
For some reason, digital foot pedals (also known as digital transcribers) seem to intimidate some MTs, and are completely ignored by most training vendors.
If you can connect a printer to your computer, you can set up a digital foot pedal. There is nothing the least difficult about it, and if schools would stop training with archaic equipment, MTs would stop being intimidated into believing that digital is complicated.
We do understand that new equipment can be a little overwhelming. Therefore; we have created video tutorials to help walk you through how to set up the pedal with the medical transcription software. These are located in our student area.
Your pedal will not come with a headset. You will need to purchase a headset (headphones) that is comfortable for you. Computer headsets are not expensive.
They start at around $25. Make sure you buy your headset from a store where you can return it if it isn't comfortable.
The headset plugs into your computer where the headphones jack is located.
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