Your Medical Transcription Course for Nurses comes with a Medical Speller that will import into MS Word.
High accuracy is a minimum job requirement for medical transcriptionists. As you are aware, transcribed reports are permanent medical legal documents. Careless work is unacceptable and will get you fired.
High productivity is also a job requirement. We are frequently asked, "Which is more important: high productivity or high accuracy?"
Our answer: Both are essential to succeed as a medical transcriptionist.
Anything you can do to decrease the potential for errors while increasing your productivity is good. Desirable and to be sought after, yet many schools discourage students from using medical spellers.
Naturally, schools want their students to learn to spell the terms correctly. This is certainly laudable.
Unfortunately, avoiding the use of a medical speller doesn't result in students who know how to spell medical terms.
Educators who support the "look it up in the dictionary and you'll remember it next time" theory have apparently forgotten their own childhood. Looking a word up in a dictionary simply disrupts work flow. When the student is confronted with the same word two weeks later, she still won't know how to spell it and will have to stop and look it up again.
The only way to learn to spell an unfamiliar word is to make a conscious effort to commit the spelling to memory. Thumbing through a 10 lb. dictionary doesn't accomplish a thing.
It is far more important to practice developing a fast, smooth transcription rhythm than to participate in grammar school games promoting the moral value of "looking it up."
A friend of ours provides a perfect example. She is a very successful MT, (earning nearly $100k), but for some reason she simply cannot remember how to spell "axillary." This is a simple word, right? Yet she stumbles over it every time and relies on her medical speller to remove the extra "i" she invariably inserts.
We suggest students install a quality medical speller immediately and use it during all transcription sessions. By the time you are ready for a job; your medical speller should be so familiar to you that you hardly notice it at all. The sooner you begin using it, the more valuable it will be when you start work, because you will have had time to add entries.
The Spelling Module contains over 60,000 medical terms and can be installed seamlessly into MS Word.
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