There is no such thing as a "standard" rate or what some refer to as a "going rate." Nobody can tell you if what you're paying for transcription is reasonable, fair or otherwise equitable. The requirements from facility to facility are too different for that. A colleague at another facility in your same town may tell you their line rate is much less than yours and you need to renegotiate it, but unless you share details of the contract and both facilities operate on the exact same terms, you aren't making an apples-to-apples comparison. Your billing rate may be very reasonable for the services you're getting. You may read in a publication that "nobody should pay more than $0.XX per line" for transcription - but that ignores the details of what the client requires and the definition of a billable unit. Statements like this have contributed to ongoing issues with contracted rates and billable units.

There are three factors in transcription: price, quality and turnaround. Regardless of what they promise, a service can only deliver two of the three. If the price is low, quality and/or turnaround is impacted. The higher the price, the better the turnaround and quality.

We aren't going to get into a discussion of what constitutes an average billing rate for transcription services. What we can do is help you determine if what you're being billed is congruent with the contract and whether your are actually getting the services outlined in the contract.

Sometimes this is as simple as taking what we know about averages in the industry and breaking down it down to see if the math adds up.

Each of the scenarios presents a breakdown of costs by line, based on a variety of assumptions. Each scenario is evaluated in terms of price, quality and turnaround and what the customer could likely expect from this company. You can use these scenarios to draw a variety of conclusions about your own outsourced service vendor, or you can contact ACT for a consultation.

Scenario #1: 12 cpl (65 characters)

a line is defined as 65 characters

all characters are counted, including spaces, tabs, returns

transcriptionists are employees

transcriptionists are in the United States and therefore the company is responsible for paying employee taxes

transcriptionists are paid minimal benefits

transcriptionists are paid for the same characters as the client is billed and a line is 65 characters

the vendor utilizes an ASP platform and toll-free dictation is included in the service

Editors (QA) are employees paid on a production basis

the vendor maintains a physical office location, with some employees working in the office and production and QA working from home.

Scenario #2: 14 cpl using the VBC

a line is defined as 65 characters

all characters are counted, including spaces, tabs, returns

transcriptionists are employees

transcriptionists are in the United States and therefore the company is responsible for paying employee taxes

transcriptionists are paid minimal benefits

transcriptionists are paid for the same characters as the client is billed and a line is 65 characters

the vendor utilizes an ASP platform and toll-free dictation is included in the service

Editors (QA) are employees paid on a production basis

the vendor maintains a physical office location, with some employees working in the office and production and QA working from home.

Additional scenarios will be added as we get feedback from visitors.