may be a "safe" job...meaning it doesn't face imminent outsourcing to countries (such as India) with cheap labor...I think this type of job WILL be outsourced but perhaps not within the next few years.
http://www.indiainfoline.com/cyva/repo/medi/ch03.htmlThe medical transcription industry had its genesis in the USA and was a development of three requirements:
the need to maintain basic hospital data,
recording of data and medical procedures for research and
records for insurance purposes.
Today medical practices in the US are bound by strict codes of ethics and statutes, which if flouted can lead to expensive malpractice lawsuits. Hence a high level of documentation is required at every stage of treatment, and Medical Associations have mandatory and complex requirements on documentation from doctors.
This being a highly time consuming process and demanding additional skills on the part of the doctor, the solution to this problem lay in outsourcing trained professionals to convert voice files into typed forms. Since medical practices in other parts of the world are not driven by the kind of regulatory and legal requirements that exist in the USA, the demand for medical transcription does not exist in any meaningful way anywhere else. In India too the demand for medical transcription is yet to come of age and it is safe to say that for the next five years there would be no demand for transcription as there is in the USA.
The current practice is for doctors to simply record their findings through a dictaphone or some such device.These sound tracks are then sent through datacom lines to overseas companies (where costs are much lower) that employ "medical transcriptionists" who hear these recordings, transcribe them into reports and send them back electronically through datacom lines. Initially, it was only being contracted out to companies that were in close proximity to these hospitals. Increasingly, however to take advantage of lower costs, this work is being sent to abroad to Mexico, West Indies etc. Because of the availability of high speed satellite links, it is now entirely feasible to do this.