1-6 EARN AND LEARN: REALITY OR HYPE?

You often hear court reporters talk about diversifying their businesses. Usually it's wistful chitchat about opening a floral boutique or a coffee shop followed by a hurried return to reality: "I stay in court reporting because it's more lucrative than painting landscapes." It seems reporting produces that animal reflex -- fight or flight. But there are alternative business opportunities using reporting skills. Here is one reporter's story about how her company has embraced information reporting.

Rewind to the late 1980s: I work at Catuogno Court Reporting Services in Massachusetts. We have a family business where my dad reports depositions and lunches with lawyers by day, vacu-ums and dusts the office by night. I run a court reporting school two nights a week. My students are striv-ing to pass the 200 wpm mark so they can take some of the work load away from our overburdened reporters and reduce our six-week turnaround time. My brother just started as our office manager, grappling with the daily frenzy of running our front desk. About the last thing on our minds is adding new clients to our al-ready backbreaking schedule.

Hold on. There are some people in the reception room. They're the su-pervisors from the medical group down the hall. They've walked into our office with a request that we type their medical reports. Ha! "We're not typists, we're court reporters! Thanks, guys, but no thanks." That was the end of that. Or so we thought

Fast-forward to 1990: The guys from the medical group have been back several times. The answer is still no. We direct them to the Yellow Pages. Think they'd get the hint? No way. They're back again. They "really need" a transcription service. Well, my brother has tamed the front desk and business has slowed down, what with mediation, insurance con-tracting and the additional reporters in the field resulting from the local court reporting school reopening. Heck, we're getting deposition tran-scripts delivered in a week and our profit margin is less than ever! Does this sound familiar to anyone? Our business advisors are suggesting we look for alternative revenue streams. Maybe we could type just a few re-ports for them, they suggest.

Fast-forward again, this time to 1994: You guessed it; we're into it big time. We've purchased multiport phone-in dictation computers from a couple of those big outfits and hired some experienced medical transcriptionists. It was quite an investment. Fortunately, with lots of baby steps, the transcription business took off, primarily by word of mouth. Apparently our clients were not used to the high-quality, expert service we pro-vide them -- we're court reporters, after all, specialists in producing an accurate transcript -- and their nod of approval came in the form of refer-rals. Our client list grew rapidly.

It's now 1997 and the growth rate of our transcription business far out-paces that of our court reporting business. The gain has been expo-nential. Take the doctors again. A doctor working for one medical group who uses our service will then introduce our technology to a second medical group she's working for. Once she gets accustomed to the phone-in dictation process, it becomes unthinkable to even consider using cassette tapes again.

Today we're able to offer an array of services to our legal clients. Attor-neys are phoning in pleadings, interrogatories and other legal documents to be transcribed by us. How does the phone-in dictation process work? Doctors call into our computer and dictate their reports over the phone. The dictation is con-verted into digital signals and sent to the hard drive. Because it's digital and not an analog system (tape recorder), new dictation can be inserted into previously dictated material. When the dictation is complete, medical transcriptionists working from remote PCs dial into our com-puter and retrieve the dictated File, which they then transcribe and re-turn by modem directly to the doc-tor's 'mailbox." The doctor uploads the completed transcription, which he prints himself. For the clients, it's ease of use. No cassette tapes and no hand-scrawled notes to decipher long after the ink is dry. For our agency it's low operational overhead. No paper, no mailing costs! (Deposition work should be so uncomplicated.)

An important element of the expo-nential growth in the medical transcription business is the passage of new rules mandating "typed" records. Some branches of medicine did not customarily use transcription ser-vices and must now comply with such regulations. And there are other markets - contacts we've all made in court reporting. Newspapers recognize the value of our service when they inter-view a political candidate, for exam-ple. Insurance companies take millions of statements each year that aren't "important" enough to hire a court reporter -- minor car accidents or property claims. Another new mar-ket we've targeted is law enforcement agencies that take hundreds of state-ments a week, from eyewitness ac-counts to victim complaints to defendants' confessions.

The goal for this year is to use stenotype machines to produce the medical reports. There are some ex-cellent rapid-text entry software pro-grams available today. To quote a recent article in a reporting publication, "If you type 80 wpm on a QWERTY keyboard, you are consid-ered an excellent typist in the tran-scription world. ... A transcriptionist who writes at 160 wpm is producing 100 percent more work than an excel-lent typist."

Our best transcriptionists on the QWERTY keyboard earn over $25,000 annually. Just think what student re-porters could earn even on a part-time basis. It certainly would help pay for school. Not to mention the con-tacts and experience they'd have by the time they graduate. Or, how about former court reporting students who never met their 225-wpm goals? Just what do they do with their steno ma-chines, shorthand skills and knowledge of medical terminology?

How do we currently find qualified medical transcriptionists to transcribe such specialized work? Even the most complex medical terminology - operative reports, oncology - is fairly repetitive. We often use our senior transcriptionists to train the new staff. They train them on the use of equipment, such as transcribers and modems, and proofread their printed reports.

As a court reporting agency, we took the challenge to diversify and expand into new markets. We've been successful. Our Information Reporting Sofware vendor is pulling us along into new markets. They've been successful. NCRA's committees are looking at new career opportunities for court reporters. Those assignments are out there. Technology will not be ignored.