How Much Money Do Medical Transcriptionists Make?
Medical transcriptionists are responsible for documenting the procedures performed by physicians and other medical practitioners. Using a headset and a foot pedal to modulate sound, they listen to dictated recordings from medical staff and generate the required documents. These include procedure notes, reports on operations, updates of medical histories, referral letters, autopsy reports and discharge notes. The transcriptionist returns the document to the physician for checking and signing before it is filed and becomes an official document. A medical transcriptionist's salary will be affected by factors such as location and employer type.
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Average Pay
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In its national survey of employment conducted in 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gathered wage information from over 80,000 individuals working as medical transcriptionists across the United States. It concluded that the average annual salary for the profession was $33,350, equivalent to $2,779 a month or $16.03 an hour. The Bureau's figure corresponds roughly with those produced by two wage comparison websites in 2011. Salary.com placed the average pay rate for a medical transcriptionist at $38,477 while PayScale.com reported an average of between $24,414 and $35,827 annually and $12.04 to $16.52 an hour.
Pay by Industry
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A medical transcriptionist's salary is likely to vary depending upon which sector of the health care industry she works in. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that medical and diagnostic laboratories offered the highest wages, an average of $38,680. Positions within the offices of dentists also paid comparatively high salaries -- $36,170 -- while general medical and surgical hospitals were listed at $34,480. Outpatient care centers and the offices of physicians offered comparable levels of pay to medical transcriptionists -- $32,870 and $32,410, respectively.
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Pay by Location
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A second factor influencing a medical transcriptionist's salary is the geographical location in which he works. The 2009 BLS survey found that, across all industry sectors, Massachusetts and Alaska were the states in which a transcriptionist was likely to get the highest wages, an average of $42,880 and $42,640, respectively. In contrast, North Dakota was listed at $27,700. At the level of metropolitan areas, the Brockton, Bridgewater, Easton district of Massachusetts topped the table with $67,360 while Rapid City, South Dakota was listed at $29,540.
Outlook
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment opportunities for medical transcriptionists to increase by approximately 11 percent in the years from 2008 to 2018. The health care industry as a whole will expand over that period to meet the needs of a growing, aging population. The knock-on effect will be an increasing demand for transcriptionists to maintain a higher volume of medical records. This will be augmented by the increased computerization of records to be electronically shared between parties -- health care providers, insurance companies, regulators. As such, pay levels for the profession should remain competitive, with those certified by the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) likely to achieve the highest rates.
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