Many doctors specialize in particular areas of medicine. Doctors may be experts in orthopedics, hematology, oncology, or gerontology. Physicians, however, have often had little training in how to run a business. That's why many private practices and clinics outsource their billing and hire practice management consultants.

Our specialty is managing the dictation/transcription process. Whenever we take on a new client a very important role reversal takes place: Alert & Oriented's management team becomes the doctor and the doctor's practice becomes our patient. We outline a treatment program which will help you handle your dictation on a cost-effective basis. We also show you how to work effectively with the computers you have in your office to process the transcribed reports which will be delivered to you electronically.

Whereas other transcription services may bill by the line, page or character count, we bill according to the minute of recorded dictation time on our digital dictation system (which clocks your speech to the 1/100th of a minute). This means that instead of paying for an actual word, line or character count, you are paying for access to our digital dictation system on a p.r.n. basis.

If you are dialing from within the 415/510/650 area codes, it should only require a local call to access our digital dictation system. However, we strongly advise that you check with your phone company to determine whether our dictation number is a local call for you, as our clients are responsible for any long distance charges incurred while accessing our system.

Our standard rate is $2.25 per minute of recorded dictation time for a 48-hour turnaround (on an apples to oranges basis, this works out to approximately 18 cents per line). We offer clients a 5% "Early Bird Discount" if they pay their bill within 10 days of invoicing.

It usually takes us five business days to get your practice online and ready to dictate. Therefore, if you are shopping for a new transcription service, we suggest that you allow sufficient time to get set up as a client before you need to start dictating. Certain preliminary steps must be taken before we can begin to transcribe your dictation:

• We require a nonrefundable deposit of $150 which will be credited to your account.
  
  
• We need a clear handle on the volume of dictation you expect to be producing.
  
  
• We need samples of your reports so that we can do the computer programming needed to create templates and codes for your work.
  
  
• We need to know which wordprocessing program you use (Corel WordPerfect or Microsoft Word) and which generation of that program you have on your computers.
  
  
• We need to know which operating platform you are using (Windows or MAC).
  
  
• We need the e-mail address for the person (you or your support staff) who will be receiving and processing your transcribed reports.