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At Care Technologies India, we define a line as 65 characters; a standard long adhered to in the medical transcription industry within the United States. We use the same standard for all our clients in the United States , the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The definition of the line includes keystrokes used in the text of the report, all header and footer information, function keys and other keystrokes such as space bar, tab, carriage return, underscore, bold, etc., as well as those characters used to identify dictation demographics.
The 65-character line standard is highly accurate, because it is does not matter what font size, page margins or line spacing is used. For example, if you dictated "Dear Dr Jones" we would count that as 13 characters (spaces between words are included) or one fifth of a line, and not one line even though this would appear as a separate line in the report. You would incur a charge for one 65 character line after whatever follows “Dear Dr Jones” on the page has reached another 52 characters (13+52=65), irrespective of the number of physical lines the 65 characters were spread over.
This usually results in a cost-savings of 30% over the "gross line" standard where every line on a page is counted separately whether the line contains two words or seven words.
Care Technologies uses an automated system for counting lines in all our medical transcripts. The total number of keystrokes contained within the document is divided by 65 and rounded to the next integer to determine the number of lines in the document. Our line counts are easily verifiable, and are 100% accurate.
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