Home-based businesses – Working from home

Home-Based Businesses – Working From Home:

According to funcareers.com, jobs in the medical support services industry, such as medical transcription and billing, are among the top-ranked home-based business opportunities available today. Meditec agrees with that assessment and in fact, we’ve known this to be true for more than 20 years!

A recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune’s employment section, highlighted the growing number of employment opportunities for people who want to work from home. The article primarily focused on the growing home-based call center industry employees now termed “cyberagents.” As of the date written, it was estimated that 112,000 cyberagents were presently working with that number expected to triple by 2010! Those numbers represent an overall trend for businesses – it costs much less for the same or better work products. Economic facts: Whatever work may possibly be done at home will be done at home using the latest computer and internet technologies.

Meditec recently featured (in the What’s New section on the home page) a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website which highlighted the continued growth and strength of the job market in the medical services industry. Medical transcription and medical billing opportunities continue to be very strong and the opportunities for those trained in these skills, who also want (or need) to work from home, are virtually limitless.

For many years, Meditec has observed this potential in its own business as well as nationally – Early on, Meditec marketed outsourcing for medical transcription services – unheard of in the industry…including private and government (VA and Indian ) hospitals. Some of these facilities were hundreds of miles away from Salt Lake City, yet independent contractors working for Meditec — working from home — provided the transcription services for these facilities. With a then state-of-the-art telephone call-in system, hundreds of physicians in private practice also used the service, eliminating the overhead related to in-house personnel transcription in their operating budget. The economic fact was the savings – hospitals at 30 to 40% less than in-house personnel, yet everyone still made money. The MT-at-home eliminated work travel, clothing, babysitters, inconvenience with the less financially tangible benefit of being at home.

Interestingly enough, it was not the internet which enabled these contracts to succeed. Quite the contrary. At a time even before the huge expansion of internet based communications, Meditec transcriptionists worked from their home offices, using standard typewriters, and cassette tape transcription equipment to generate reports. This work naturally evolved to the use of PC-based word processing applications and direct (point to point) modem-based communications to transmit completed reports, and only recently evolved to use the internet. That ultimate explosion in internet communications has definitely enhanced and increased the opportunities that have been around medical transcriptionists for decades.

The short and sweet of all this, is that medical transcriptionists have in many ways led the revolution in work-at-home business. While there are both pros and cons to being your own boss, the rewards and benefits are also outstanding. Those benefits obviously include being at home in your own comfortable space, and in many cases being able to dictate your own office hours. For most transcriptionists, the ability to earn is tied directly to the number of lines (production), so as speed and experience increase, transcriptionists automatically make more money, without having to wait for a yearly evaluation from their boss, or having to worry about incremental salary increase issues.

Meditec has seen experienced transcriptionists make more than 50K per year working less than 40 hours a week, and while this may not be typical for part-timers, it certainly demonstrates the potential for making a very good income working at home. Starting your own home-based business in the medical transcription field is one of the easiest ways to make money, and doesn’t involve stuffing envelopes or making telephone solicitations to angry consumers who’d rather be eating their dinner!

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Rules for Setting Up Your Home Office — “How do I get started?”
The following is an excerpt from Powerhomebiz.com which outlines the “Seven Rules in Setting Up Your Home Office” and we believe that everyone who works from home, regardless how what business model they choose, will benefit from these basic guidelines.

[SOURCE CREDIT]:
PowerHomeBiz.com

1. Establish your home office in a part of the house that has lots of light and air. Think about the year-round conditions in this spot, not just what it’s like during the season that you are setting up your home office. In buying lighting, match the type to task. Ambient lighting, which lights up the room, should be uniform and moderately bright. You may also want to have overhead lighting and floor lamps. Also keep the room from getting stuffy by providing the proper ventilation to room. Choose a space with windows that you can open to keep air circulating.

2. Set-up shop away from the busy areas in your home. Make sure your home office is as far as possible from potential distractions such as the kitchen, front door, family traffic and a lot of noise. This is especially important if you have children and will have child care in the house during the day. If you can see or hear your children and they can see you, it will be difficult for both you and your kids.

3. Organize your supplies. Similar to a corporate environment, you need to arrange your supplies in a way that promotes efficiency. You need not lift two stacks of bond paper just to get to your business stationery located at the furthermost end of your cabinet. Hide supplies that you do not need everyday such as extra rolls of tape and piles of bond paper; but keep within reach a small cache of supplies at your desk or near enough that you can reach them. Stack extra supplies under your desk, out of kicking range. If space permits, keep extra supplies in a cabinet or cupboard. If it makes you more comfortable and efficient, consider hanging the phone on the wall near your desk to help free some desk space.

4. Set up things so they function smoothly. Maximize the layout of your home office space with the goal of promoting efficiency of operations foremost in the design. Arrange your things to help you function better. For example, remove stacks of paper in front of your fax machine that could potentially block and jam incoming documents. Manage your workflow creatively.

5. Limit the things in your home office to items that you need for your business. Clear out all of the old clutter in your home office area. If you set-up your home office in your attic, make sure that you have enough room for all your requirements. It is difficult to work in a place filled with stuffs irrelevant to your business. However, if you cannot remove these things from the room, make sure that you move them out of your vision. Create visual and psychological separation by enclosing the area with a screen or a decorative barrier could be a way to address this problem. Tidiness of the office environment can help improve your productivity.

6. A home office does not need to be a separate room. If space is an issue, you can simply set-up a table and a chair in one corner of a room. You can also use the space underneath the stairways, the space at the end of hallways, or the loft space and landing between floors. Some even work in a nook off the kitchen. The important thing is that you can have a permanent workspace that is dedicated to your work. The disadvantage of this set-up, however, is the potential for distraction.

7. Have a dedicated work area. The ideal situation is to have a permanent room for your work area, both from a productivity and taxation point of view. A distinct workspace helps condition your mind that this is a place where you do work. Moreover, having a separate area that is used exclusively and regularly for your business is an important criterion to qualify for tax deductions for your home office. If you are prepared to do some renovations, you can consider converting your attic, basement, deck off the living room or kitchen, carport or garage into your very own home office.

About the Author:
Jenny Fulbright is a staff writer of Power Homebiz Guides — PowerHomeBiz.com

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What’s next on the work-at-home business horizon?

Just as medical transcription has been for more than two decades, other opportunities in the medical industry are becoming more common in the work-at-home field. Medical Billing and Medical Coding are two of the fastest growing markets for new home businesses. As with medical transcription, trained medical coders and billers need not be “on-site” at the medical facility in order to perform their work. Legal transcription has become a viable opportunity too, much like medical transcription was in the early ‘90s.

SCENARIO:
As a medical transcriptionist, you download a dictated report of a 12-year- old boy who has fallen from a backyard swingset and sustained a cut to his forehead. The doctor notes he cleaned dirt out of the wound, gave the young man a tetanus shot, and sutured the laceration.

As a trained medical transcriptionist, you would have the ability to transcribe this report within a few minutes and would then return the report to the doctor’s office. What happens next? A trained medical coder translates the doctor’s report into numeric codes, ICD and CPT, quantifying and classifying the nature of both the injury and treatment. What happens next? A trained medical biller has determines the related financial elements, insurance coverage, financial responsibility, whether it is medical or homeowner’s insurance, then inputs the information into a computer system, produces the required billing documents (paper or electronic), and finally monitors the payment/collection/writeoff process.

Meditec has always recommended (based again on its own experience) that MTs learn to code. About five years ago, AAMT saw the light and recommended that MTs learn to code. Some transcription companies offer coding services in tandem with transcription.

So, imagine that you can do more than transcribe the doctor’s dictated report. Imagine that you are also cross-trained in medical coding. Having completed the transcribed report, you would then pull out your ICD/CPT books and find the necessary codes. You have provided an additional service and transmitted your work product to your client. Consider too cross-training in medical billing. Now you have become a one stop shop!

In this scenario, the entire process from transcribing the report, to coding the procedures, to billing the services, could all be performed by one person — working from home. The savings to any provider in terms of the number of trained staff and the overhead in the office required to accomplish these technical services is clearly apparent. By expanding skill levels and experience, marketability is increased as well as earning potential — you would be paid not only for transcribing the report, but also for coding the services, and for processing the insurance forms, and the doctor would not have to pay two or three different people (separately) to do the job.

Meditec offers training courses in Medical Transcription, Medical Coding and Medical Billing, and has more than 35 years experience in outsourcing these services to doctors and hospitals. For many years, Meditec has provided all of these services though the use of independent contractors who (working from home) made a good living from combining their skills to offer more than one service within the overall process.

Working from home as a medical transcriptionist, medical coder, or medical biller, is a great career opportunity. Meditec encourages those seeking career changes or who are just beginning a new career consider the benefits of adding coding and billing to MT to take advantage of market opportunities.

Simply ask yourself this question: If you were a doctor in need of both a transcriptionist and a coder, and you were interviewing three people, one a transcriptionist, one a coder, and one who could do BOTH, which one would you hire? What if you were out there looking for a job and couldn’t find an opening for a transcription position right away, but you also had coding and billing skills. How much better do you think your chances would be of landing a job? We believe that cross-training should be the goal of every medical transcriptionist. The core knowledge (terminology, etc.) gained through medical transcription simply acts as an OPEN DOOR for entry into Coding and Billing, and the more doors you can open, the more successful you will be.

THIS MONTH, MEDITEC IS OFFERING DISCOUNTS OF UP TO $200 WHEN YOU ADD CODING, BILLING OR BOTH TO YOUR MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTION TRAINING COURSE — CHECK OUT THE VALUE COUPON BELOW AND CALL OUR TOLL-FREE NUMBER RIGHT NOW!

Meditec also offers a complete “ULTRA” Course which combines all of our courses (and ALL OPTIONS) into a single bundle which represents a significant savings over the cost of buying each course separately. To learn more about this fantastic opportunity, please CLICK HERE and discover the ultimate in cross-training products.