To take the CMT certification exam, AHDI recommends that candidates have two years of transcription experience, whereas the RMT exam is intended for candidates who don't have that amount of experience but are employed at a health-care setting or have completed a medical transcription program.
Generally, all medical transcription tests are comprised of the same topics and cover topics encountered within transcription practices.
Medical terms are formed when various components (prefixes, root words, suffixes, combining forms, and plurals) are linked together. This terminology is used to depict anatomical parts and structures, conditions, diagnoses, instruments/tools, indications/symptoms, procedures, protocols, tests (blood panels, biopsies, EKG, EEG, EMG, FNA, PTCA and more) and treatments.
Medical transcriptionists must know the parts of the human body, the various symptoms and their function. This is critical, as transcriptionist tests cover specialized areas of medical practice (for example cardiology, gastroenterology, orthopedics, rheumatology, and urology) and the indications/symptoms, origin and treatment protocols for the commonly diagnosed diseases within each specialty.
Candidates taking a transcription test need to know how to properly transcribe medical data for documents, including autopsy reports, operative reports, discharge summaries, consults, correspondence reports, exams, and lab results.
All transcribed documents must adhere to the criteria and guidelines pertaining to health-care documentation. The tests evaluate how accurately the documents are transcribed by looking at the candidate's language skills (spelling, grammar, and use of punctuation), formatted measurements, numbers, section notes and symbols.