Medical Administrative Assistant
If you’re considering becoming a medical administrative assistant, you’ve made a good choice. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the medical assistant field is one of the fastest growing occupations. Moreover, the BLS predicts that the growth of this occupation will remain high until at least 2016. This is good news if you like to help people but need some job security, too!
Who Needs Medical Administrative Assistants?
As a medical administrative assistant, you can choose from a wide variety of work environments. A good medical administrative can work in:
- Hospitals
- Clinics
- Physician’s offices
- Outpatient medical facilities
- Offices of chiropractors
- Offices of optometrists
Moreover, you will have the pleasure of working in a clean, safe, and well-lit environment while helping the office run smoothly.
What more could you ask for?
Duties of Administrative Medical Assistants
Medical administrative assistants are essential to the efficient operation of an office. They make sure that physicians see the correct patients at the correct times. They make sure that patients remember their appointments. They make sure that insurance forms are filled out correctly. In essence, they can—and often do—perform any office task that does not involve assisting the physician with medical treatments or procedures.
Some of the tasks of a medical administrative assistant include:
- Updating patient records
- Answering phones
- Collecting patient payments
- Billing
- Bookkeeping
- Greeting patients
- Filling out, and submitting, insurance forms
- Scheduling hospital admissions
- Sorting mail
- Scheduling laboratory testing
But your responsibilities may extend beyond clerical and administrative tasks. Many administrative medical assistants—particularly those who work in small private physician practices or clinics—perform clinical duties as well.
Medical Assistant Training
Although some employers prefer to train their own medical administrative assistants, this practice is becoming rare. Employers these days desire well-trained medical assistants, the kind that formal medical assistant training provides.
There are three types of training programs available to medical assistants.
You can generally complete a diploma or a certificate program in medical assisting within one year. An associate’s degree program can take up to two years, and involves slightly more advanced training. These programs focus on the actual job responsibilities of medical assistants. Your courses will include such job-specific subjects as:
- Office procedures
- Computer operations
- Anatomy
- Filing
- Biology
- Pharmacology
- Bookkeeping
Expect to have few, or no, general course requirements—such as World History and Social Studies—while enrolled in a diploma or a certificate degree program. The whole focus of these training programs is to train you for the specific responsibilities of medical administrative assistants.
An associate’s degree, by contrast, usually has a generous portion of general course requirements for you to fulfill along with those courses that are specific to medical assisting. But you will also gain a broader education that you can apply toward obtaining a bachelor’s or a master’s degree later on. You can complete an associate’s degree program in 2-years.
Many community and junior colleges, vocational schools, and technical schools offer medical assisting programs.
But whatever school you choose to attend, make sure that it is accredited by one of two organizations–.the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs (CAAHEP) or the Accreditation Bureau of Health Education Schools (ABHES)
In order to become certified later on—a recommended step—you must have graduated from a school that has been accredited by at least one of these organizations.