Pros
They provided the monitor and computer. I could still work from home. There were 1 or 2 proofers that were really nice and wanted to help us succeed.
Cons
We were "sold" to Amphion - that's the best way to put it. The hospital I worked for notified us that we had 3 days to decide if we wanted to go with Amphion as they said they would take all of us. There really wasn't any time to research the company in that amount of time. Promises made with no intention to keep them. Said we could pick our hours and that we would be primarily typing for the hospital we had been working for. Once we signed on, everything changed. We were told we would have plenty of work but in reality, waited for work on a daily basis. Spent one Thanksgiving waiting for work, probably typed a total of 10 reports in 9 hours. Many times told to "check back later" for available work. When I was waiting for work there was no compensation as we were paid per line and that ended up being less than minimum wage. One day, we were sent an email from our team leader stating "plug in the coffee pots and get out the catheters, we're busy today." That lasted for maybe 5-6 hours. Needed to produce a minimum line count to be eligible for insurance and PTO. Again, if the work isn't coming to us, no way of meeting those requirements. We were told we could pick our hours when in reality, we were told to work late night, overnight or weekends to make our line counts. Even when we did work the other hours, there wasn't enough work to keep us busy. Leadership was anything but that. My so-called-team leader spent most of her day posting pictures of her newly remodeled office or her son in emails and asking us about the weather in our city. The team leader was very demeaning toward a lot of the transcriptionists and apparently that is the type of person Amphion wants. She would post mistakes in a group email and she, as well as some of the other transcriptionists, would mock other transcriptionists on that mistake. It was like working for/with a bunch of middle school girls. Their idea of "helping" was to tell us to look at the resource book. There were women with 25 to 30 years of experience that were being told that they were terrible transcriptionists. I would get an email noting my "mistakes" but one of the proofers would have a blatant mistake and it was okay "as long as it didn't affect patient care." So apparently, putting an extra space behind a period affected patient care but misspelling a drug does not? Their idea of following through and accuracy is a joke. When I gave my notice, I was to send my computer back after my last day. They were going to send return labels to me but they kept sending the return labels to someone on the other side of the country. We happened to have the same name, different employee numbers, but they apparently didn't look that far into the employee records. After 2 weeks, I mailed everything back to them at my expense just to get their equipment out of my house. The supervisor also accused me of not filling out my timecard daily. I was looking right at it and it was filled out. She was looking at the other employee's timecard, not mine. I was so stressed out in the time I worked for Amphion, I lost 35 pounds in 6 months, ended up in the hospital. Recently, the facility I was working for also decided to go with Amphion and the same promises were made. They claimed that they had changed the way they did things in the past few years and things were better. No way would I ever go back to that disaster. Hopefully my last employer will soon see the mistake they made by going with Amphion as the other two facilities in town found out.
