Although medical transcription has been around in one way, shape or form since the first doctor recited the Hippocratic Oath and cave wall writing indicates that medical treatments have been recorded for over 1,000 years, the field of medical transcription has made a "quiet" leap forward over the past few years.

Perhaps one of the reasons it wallowed in obscurity was due to the fact that it wasn't even officially recognized as a profession until the late 1990's and then in 1999 the United States Department of Labor finally assigned medical transcription an official job code.

Today, medical transcriptionists transcribe dictated information from phone or other electronically recorded messages from doctors and nurses or other health care professionals into patient status reports and records.

Although it's not required to be certified in order to work as a medical transcriptionist, if you are a Certified Medical Transcriptionist or CMT the title lends additionally creditability to your skill level. The American Association for Medical Transcription oversees the testing and certification process today.

Due to emerging technology the profession is becoming increasingly more automated and the result has been higher productivity and accuracy. One example of how technology is changing medical transcription is the ever-increasing role of voice recognition software.

On the other hand, even though technology is making certain aspects of the job more efficient no technology will ever be able to completely replace a well trained medical transcriptionists mind and so qualified people will always be in demand.

Becoming a Certified Medical Transcriptionist is much more than great typing and listening skills. The good training programs cover a wide swath of knowledge ranging from medical terminology, Latin and Greek suffixes and prefixes, anatomy, biology, body systems and the wannabe medical transcriptionist must also have a reasonable grasp of diseases and how they are treated.

And if that's not enough, they must also understand surgical procedures, medical science, laboratory and surgical instruments, pharmacology, prosthetics and laboratory test results. Although the medical transcriptionist isn't required to master all of these areas they do need a basic understanding in order to understand the context of whatever they are required to transcribe.

In a nutshell, a medical transcriptionists' knowledge base and skill set must be complete.

As a result, if you are a Certified Medical Transcriptionist you will have a wide variety of job opportunities in a wide range of settings to choose from and you should never have to worry about being out of a job. You can even start your own home Medical transcriptionist business if you are so inclined because the possibilities are endless in this demanding but ever expanding profession.