The medical transcription industry is a multi-billion dollar industry (yes, that’s not a typo, it’s multi-billion). If how you’re invoiced is not transparent and straightforward, how do you know what you’re paying for? And there are more ways of charging you than you can imagine. Some of the more common ways are:
- By the line (how we charge at 2Ascribe)
- By the page
- By the minute
- By the document (common in radiology reports)
- By the keystroke (more on this later)
Other ways that are ‘creative’, are designed to increase income for the transcription company and increase costs to you.
Do you know what your transcription company charges for? Do they include:
- Your letterhead (we put it in the header so that you never pay for it)
- Headers and footers (nope, we don’t charge for those either)
- Keystrokes. Some companies charge for each keystroke. For example, PAST MEDICAL HISTORY is 30 keystrokes (one for each letter, then one keystroke for each capital and one keystroke for each underlined letter). At 2Ascribe, that’s only ten characters and spaces.
Saving you Time and Money
At 2Ascribe, we do our best to save our clients time and money. We never charge for:
- Setting up your account
- Creating (or changing) templates
And we don’t have:
- Contracts
- Minimum monthly amounts
- Minimum document charges
Billing Accuracy
As for billing our clients, do you know that you can check that we have accurately invoiced you? That’s one of the reasons that we send you a detailed billing sheet with your invoice. You can pull any document, and do a characters and spaces count, divide by 65 (the number of characters in a line) and that’s the number of lines that appear on your invoice. How does that compare to your current transcription companies invoicing practices?
How Long is a Line?
We charge by the line. We use the industry standard of one line is equal to 65 characters and spaces. We’ve seen lines defined as little as 50 characters and spaces (a 30% increase over what we charge). 55 characters and spaces per line are quite common. And 55 keystrokes per line are also quite common in the industry. Think how much more that would cost you.
And what about those spaces? We use what the industry refers to as ‘normalized spaces’. So if the transcriptionist puts in extra spaces at the end of each paragraph, or anywhere in your documents, our system finds them and changes them into a single space.
Is Per Minute or Per Line better?
We’ve checked this over the years. On average, physicians dictate at ten lines per minute. So if you’re paying 0.20 per line, that’s equivalent to $2.00 a minute. So when you’re getting quotes, you can figure out what the better price is. Obviously, 0.20 per line is better than $2.25 per minute.
Thinking About Talking Faster?
Thinking about talking faster to save money if you’re paying per minute? Well, the faster you talk, the more difficult it is to transcribe your dictations, so you’ll probably spend more time editing your documents and filling in the blanks that the transcriptionist can’t make out. If you’re netting $100,000 per year (do the math to multiple for your income level), your time is worth (assuming four weeks’ vacation a year and a 40 hour work week), your time is worth 0.87 per minute. Spending another minute to dictate clearly is only costing you 0.87, but it could cost you several minutes in additional editing. If you can save 10 minutes a day in doing less editing, you can see another patient. Your cost is $8.70. How much would your income be for those 10 minutes? In Ontario, a minor assessment (A001) pays $21.70 (2017).
At 2Ascribe, we offer quality transcription services and transparent pricing. Call us today for a quote.
2Ascribe Inc. is a medical transcription services agency located in Toronto, Ontario Canada, providing medical transcription services to physicians, clinics and other healthcare providers across Canada and the US. Having recently introduced WEBscribe, a client interface portal for document management, 2Ascribe continues to implement and develop technology to assist and improve the transcription process for physicians and other healthcare providers. As a service to our clients and the healthcare industry, 2Ascribe offers articles of interest to physicians and other healthcare professionals, medical transcriptionists and office staff, as well as of general interest. Additional articles may be found at https://www.2ascribe.com.
