Glossary
Medical Transcriptionist Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential medical transcriptionist terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key medical transcriptionist vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in medical transcriptionist training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Abbreviation
- Shortened term.
- Dictation
- Recorded spoken report.
- Discharge summary
- End-of-stay report.
- Flag
- Note for clarification.
- Foot pedal
- Controls playback.
- H&P
- History and physical.
- HIPAA
- Privacy law.
- Homonym
- Similar-sounding words.
- Line count
- Production measure.
- Normals
- Standard text blocks.
- Operative report
- Surgery report.
- QA
- Quality assurance.
- Speech recognition
- Software that converts speech to text.
- TAT
- Turnaround time.
- Template
- Report format.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Medical Transcriptionist practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Medical Transcriptionist training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.