Tips to Improve Your Medical Transcriptionist Key Skills

Last Updated On: August 22, 2019

inTranslation Skills

A vector illustration of a medical transcription worker.


  1. The transcriptionist should listen to the audio recording first before beginning the transcription process. This may seem a waste of time but because you get the gist of what the recording is all about the transcription is actually a lot quicker to complete. It helps you get used to the accent, especially if it is not the same as your own.
  2. Once you have started the transcription you should try and listen to each complete sentence one at a time before you transcribe it. This gives you a better sense of the content of the recording. Just transcribing a few words in part of a sentence encourages you to lose the meaning of the text.
  3. For a medical transcriptionist’s key skills, it is important to place accuracy ahead of speed. If you try to do the job too quickly you will end up with misspellings and typos scattered throughout your transcription. If you think you are a little too slow, try accessing software for touch typing which you will find online. Keep practising with it until you see a marked improvement in your accuracy and speed combined.
  4. Editing a medical transcription is almost as important as writing it. You have to be quick and accurate with your editing skills, as even the most seasoned transcriptionist makes mistakes with grammar, spelling and punctuation. If the transcription is about the medical condition of someone you certainly cannot afford to be inaccurate.
  5. A good transcriptionist is all about having great typing skills, so when you are not involved in a job you should practise your typing skills as much as you can. Most people forget that they have 10 fingers at their disposal, but they only tend to use two or three at the most. Online training programs, many of which are free, enable you to enhance your typing technique and speed so you can learn to work at a faster, more comfortable, rate.
  6. As you consider yourself to be a medical transcriptionist with great medical transcriptionist skills, to further your key to your success you need to acquire more familiarity with medical terms. There is never a point in time when you are likely to know all medical terms as there are so many of them. The more you get to know and the more you get to understand about medical terms you will find your job becomes a lot easier. This is particularly important when it comes to the use of abbreviations as in medical language there may be some abbreviations which are the same but depending on the context means something totally different. You have to get to know these abbreviations so you can speed up your transcription.
  7. Proofreading is more than just editing grammar and spelling while ensuring each term you have written in the transcription is correct. The proofreading process which you should do in the quickest possible time making sure you get the correct terms in transcription are one part of proofreading but you should also make sure that each paragraph is correctly written and makes sense. Of course, it has to be factually correct as well, but getting that right depends on how accurate your transcription skills are, not your knowledge of the health and medical industry.

Medical transcription translations

Some transcriptionists have dual skills; one is being a transcriptionist in their native language and the other is being bilingual with the ability to translate a transcription while listening to an audio recording. This is a specialist transcriptionist who has multiple skills ranging from perfect knowledge of a second language, having a keen eye for detail, perfect accuracy, good typing speeds, knowledge of medical terminology in two languages and the ability to concentrate without faltering.

Medical transcriptionist trends

Medical transcriptionist trends indicate that more and more clients are looking for the cheapest transcriptionist service which they tend to find by outsourcing and not through the local market. The main reasons for this are as follows:


  • It cuts a lot off the hiring and equipment costs.
  • The internet means transcriptionists can be hired from anywhere throughout the world at a fraction of the cost of local labour.
  • There are far more skilled and experienced transcriptionists available abroad than are actually required which keeps the costs down.

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