What is the future of Medical transcription career?

For US transcriptionists, work load is being impacted by overseas competition, speech recognition and electronic medical records. For transcriptionists working in countries such as India and the Philippines, the outlook remains good, as more volume is being shifted overseas to those countries.

Medical transcription will be always needed. Doctors usually and will probably never have the time of making reports onto the computer, and will just have a chance to onto tape. The only thing is with tape and with any audio version, you cannot gaurantee that it would be good quality up to 7+ years in which a file can be destroyed. All medical records are legal files, and must be kept for a period of 7+ years. This includes labs, surgeries, discharge, history and physicals, autopsies, pathology, radiology and so on. Also, a lot of records are going onto EMR (electronic medical record), and it depends whether you're able to save the audio files on this version, as the audio files tend to be a lot larger than that of a computer record, and with you having to keep all 7+ years of patient records, I doubt whether you would be able to have a lot of audio reports. They might give so much room per patient. I hope that this helps.