Medical transcriptionists play an important role in health care by taking the doctors' or other health-care providers' dictation and transcribing it into medical records. Documents that medical transcriptionists prepare include discharge summaries, reports of medical histories or examinations, reports from surgical procedures or consultations, autopsy reports, progress notes, and referral letters. Most employers prefer people who have a medical transcription degree or who have taken medical transcription classes. Several vocational schools, community colleges, and distance learning programs offer a two-year associate's degree or a one-year certificate program in medical transcription.
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A Career as a Medical Transcriptionist
To understand and be able to transcribe reports that have been dictated, you need to study medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, diagnostic procedures, pharmacology, and treatment assessments. You should study medical terminology and abbreviations so you can translate them into their expanded forms. Course work in legal issues relating to health-care documentation is highly recommended, as well. Knowledge of English grammar and computer skills are essential. Some medical transcriptionists are paid by the hour, while others are paid by how many reports they transcribe. Pay can range from about $10 an hour to more than $21 an hour. Medical transcriptionists can work from their home as independent contractors, or in a health-care setting such as a hospital or physician's office. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job opportunities for medical transcribers should be good, especially for those who are certified, as baby boomers age and the demand for health care increases.


Unquestionably, it’s not in question in park
The Everglades is home to one of the most unique ecosystems in the world. The community of plants and animals living together, which make up an ecosystem, signals a partnership between Florida’s environment and the millions who live in South Florida. At its core is Everglades National Park. This slide show focuses on aspects of the ecosystem. The park’s Paurotis Pond is dazzling at sunset, and visitors can spot nesting birds there, perhaps including the endangered wood stork. The Noble Hammock Canoe Trail twists tightly through the mangroves. The roots of mangroves stretch skyward trying to capture the sunlight. Trees with hanging moss at Flamingo in the park are reminiscent of the Old South. The great white heron is found across warmer regions.


Answer: Health communication can be defined as communication strategies used to inform and impact individual and community decisions with the goal of improving and enriching personal and community behaviors and public health practices. It includes the study of audience health attitudes and behaviors to determine the type, frequency, and format of messaging. Individuals with an education in health communication can find employment in public relations, patient education, health administration, digital and social communications, healthcare policy and advocacy, community health, health and pharmaceutical marketing, and other related fields.
Health communication is an expansive field that includes health education, risk communication, health and policy advocacy, outbreak communication, patient and provider communication, and health literacy. Health communication strategies allow doctors and nurses, community health centers, hospitals and hospital administrators, nursing homes, health educators, nonprofits, government agencies, and others to disseminate information that can positively influence personal health behaviors and choices. Health communication includes interpersonal communications, such as one-on-one meetings between a health care provider and patient, as well as community-focused communications, such as public meetings, local newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, or educational events. It also includes mass media communication, through social media, internet, television, and radio messaging to reach large audiences with information about preventative health care, disease prevention and treatment, immunizations, and more.
In addition, health communication is a scholarly field of research. Researchers in academia study how messages are created, shaped, and received within different demographic contexts, such as age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or political orientation. Communication researchers may consider how interpersonal communication influences an individual’s attitudes or beliefs around medical treatment, such as immunizations. They may explore how online messaging impacts trust levels regarding medical information, or examine the ramifications of how emerging media technologies (e.g. mobile phones) are changing the methods in which people receive and share public health and medical information.
Master’s in Health Communication Programs
Master’s in health communication programs provide students with a foundational understanding of the theory behind and effective practice of health communication in medicine, public health, epidemiology, and more. These programs introduce students to organizational and interpersonal communication practices in health care settings. Students gain skills in developing and implementing effective health promotion materials and disease prevention campaigns, participate in health policy advocacy, and evaluate strategic communication initiatives.
Health communication master’s programs address communication topics across the health care system, including one-on-one patient-provider discussions, family and community communication, patient advocacy, administrative communication, health care literacy, intervention and care planning, and more. Although most programs emphasize applied learning and professional skill development in health messaging and marketing, there are programs with a broader academic and research focus that prepare students for continued studies at the doctoral level. Such programs may have classes that ask students to explore the relationship of social psychology and health behaviors, examine how social inequality influences health behaviors, or to apply the principles of risk communication in developing new approaches to local disease prevention campaigns.
For additional information about the curriculum for master’s in health communication programs, degree requirements, and sample course plans, please refer to our Master’s in Health Communications Programs page.
|Featured Online Master's in Health Communication Programs|
Online Master of Arts in Communication with an Optional Concentration in Health Communication
Online Master of Science in Communication with a Concentration in Health Communication
Online Master of Science in Health Promotion Management
|Click on the school name to visit our school profile page for each program or visit the school's website to download a program brochure.|
Careers in Health Communication
A degree in health communication can open doors to potential career paths throughout the health care industry, in areas such as public relations, social marketing, patient advocacy, health education, community health organizing, and more. Professionals with a background in health communication can pursue employment with biotechnology firms, social advocacy organizations, non-profits, hospitals and health departments, state and federal health agencies, health foundations, community health centers, and other related institutions with a health-related mission statement.
Their strong written and oral communication skills, coupled with their understanding of human psychology and behavior, qualifies them to support important public health causes, empower patients through health education initiatives, and develop marketing strategies for companies that have products or services that promote consumer well-being. Graduates of master’s programs in health communication may assume roles such as one of the following:
- Community Health Education Specialist: Health education specialists plan, develop, and implement preventative health, advocacy, and patient education initiatives. Their work involves frequent interaction with patients and health care providers. Their job also involves making connections with organizations in the community, such as schools, fitness centers, and reproductive health clinics in an effort to campaign for healthy lifestyle habits, health risk awareness, and other preventative care measures. Community health education specialists’ mission is to create educational programs for patients and the community that improve health outcomes in the short and long-term.
- Social Advocacy Strategists: Social advocacy strategists who work for health-related organizations are experts in creating media campaigns that spread the message and further the mission of the organizations that employ them. Strategists employ written web content, video, public outreach events, and social media campaigns to create and spread important health-related messages that seek to create positive behavior changes in target audiences.
- Marketing or Public Relations Specialist: Health-related companies ranging from hospitals to health insurance companies and fitness technology companies must develop sound marketing and public relations strategies. Marketing and public relations specialists at these companies wear many hats in order to uphold their company’s brand identity. Their daily work may include drafting public relations announcements in response to key company events (such as acquisitions or customer inquiries), developing marketing campaigns that combine patient/consumer education with brand promotion, and writing intra-company communications to help educate employees about their company’s mission.
- Journalists: Journalists who specialize in health-related communication write about the health care system, the accessibility and quality of patient care, and the environmental and socioeconomic factors that affect the health of different demographic groups. Their goal is to spread awareness of issues relating to health, in order to empower their readers with the knowledge to better care for themselves and their families. Journalists in this field may also write articles and opinion pieces advocating for positive changes in the health care system and/or in government regulations that affect community health.
- College Professor: In four-year public and private universities and colleges, professors conduct original research in health communication topics, teach graduate and undergraduate courses, write journal articles, present at conferences, and serve on committees. Their work focuses on advancing scholarship in health communication and preparing the next generation of communication professionals and scholars in the field. Graduates may also explore teaching positions in community and junior colleges.


Philosophy professor questions age-old thoughts on sound
November 07, 2008
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LEWISBURG, Pa. -- The study of philosophy requires a natural skepticism of well-known “truths,” a keen ability to observe and the discipline to accept that definitive answers come rarely, if ever.
So it stands to reason that a philosopher would come to question a basic tenet of his field.
Jason Leddington, an assistant professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, studies sensory perception and the relationship between perceptual experience and thought. His study of the nature of hearing is challenging a well-accepted assumption in philosophy: that what we hear are first and foremost sounds and not the events that cause sounds.
In arguing that what we actually hear are the events, Leddington is going up against some of the most prominent scholars in his discipline, not the least of which is Aristotle.
“Aristotle believed that each sense has its proper object. For sight, it’s color. For hearing, it’s sound,” Leddington explained. “I think that, strictly speaking, this view is false.”
Rethinking our world Leddington, who joined Bucknell in August, argues that sensory perception is our primary means of learning about and understanding -- or misunderstanding -- the world. The beliefs we acquire through our senses -- sometimes accurate and sometimes not -- shape our lives in fundamental ways.
“Part of understanding ourselves is understanding how it is that we acquire knowledge about and come to be able to think about the world around us,” Leddington said. “If we get that wrong then what we’ve gotten wrong is a critical component of our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world.”
Leddington most recently presented his work in a talk, “Naïve Realism and Perceptual Phenomenology,” at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study at the University of London, where he was a visiting research fellow. He also spoke at the 2008 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association at the University of Aberdeen, the main annual philosophical conference in the United Kingdom. A version of the talk, “Perceptual Presence,” is to be published in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
Changing the way we think Although philosophy, by its nature, does not always provide definitive answers, perception plays an integral role in how we think about and assess people and things in the world, Leddington noted. Judgments on the basis of perception influence the successes and failures of politicians, the decisions of world leaders and the conviction or acquittal of people accused of crimes. In asking us to reflect on just what we perceive, Leddington’s work could have far-reaching implications.
“The kind of philosophy I do, in a certain sense, lacks practical application but contributes to the project of self-understanding,” Leddington said. “The basic point of my work is to understand our position as thinkers and knowers in the world, and perception is central to that. This project of self-understanding is valuable in and of itself.”
Leddington, who began his research on perception in 2003 while working toward his doctoral degree at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., started with an investigation of how perceptual experience enables us to think special kinds of thoughts about the world. He continued his work at Centre College in Danville, Ky., and this past summer at the University of London.
Perhaps surprisingly, Leddington’s research depends less on scientific experiment than on close attention to everyday speech.
“I am paying attention to how we employ words and what that shows us about the structure and nature of thinking -- and about perception,” Leddington said. “Much contemporary philosophy is like this. It’s part of the project of understanding the world in which we live and of thinking more carefully and precisely about the things that are ubiquitous in our lives.”
Many philosophers have come around to the idea that what we see, first and foremost, are objects, and that those objects have color, Leddington noted. Fewer philosophers subscribe to a similar point of view when it comes to hearing
“They would say you hear a sound, and then there is the event,” he said.
Leddington challenges that assumption. He uses the example of leaves of a tree rustling in the wind. While traditional philosophy says that people hear the sound of leaves rustling in the wind, Leddington argues that what we hear is the action or movement of the leaves, and that the sound is a property of that action. That may seem like a simple idea, but it is not commonly accepted among philosophers.
'What was that?' Leddington is exploring his theories by examining how people describe sounds in speech. If, for instance, a person says she hears a bird chirping, she describes an action rather than a sound. Similarly, when a person hears something and asks, “What was that?” the common response is to refer to the event responsible for the noise, not to the noise itself.
“You’d say, ‘That was the dog barking.’” Leddington said. “The answer, ‘It was a barking sound,’ is typically just inappropriate -- and that reveals something about what we perceive. What we hear first and foremost are events, not sounds. And just as colors are properties of objects, sounds are properties of events.”
Part of Leddington’s project is to understand how we can come to know things about the world by means of sense-perception, and this has serious practical and ethical consequences.
People have the ability to recognize objects, such as sunglasses and birds, simply by looking at them. Because we have these remarkable cognitive abilities, we sometimes think we can know things on the basis of perception when we can’t. In other words, we overestimate our abilities.
“Sometimes we see something and we mistakenly think we know what it is just by seeing it. In this sense, we can make errors about the extent of our own capacities,” Leddington said. “Some people think by looking at someone you can tell if they are Jewish, heterosexual or gay, but for the most part you can’t. These are failures to recognize our perceptual and cognitive limitations. Understanding these limitations requires modesty and critical reflection.”
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