Medical Office Assistant
What is a medical office assistant? A medical office assistant works on offices or clinics of general practitioners or physicians, hospitals and other health care provider venues. Medical office assistants are responsible for the maintenance of office efficiency. Medical office assistants’ duties and responsibilities are wide ranged. Some of the duties and responsibilities of a medical office assistant may involve in the following: meet arrivals on the front desk, organize, update or schedule meetings and conferences, file charts, patient information data entry and process insurance forms. Some medical office assistants may also assists laboratory tests and analysis, therapies and patient’s laboratory reports. Mostly, a medical office assistant’s duties include office policies, procedures and interactions, medical billings and other health care related services business.
Students who study medical office assistant programs are trained with the necessary office management and technical skills, or other skills that are essential in a professional office environment. Medical office assistants work on private practice offices, hospitals, clinics and health care institutions. Private practices consist of general and family physicians, or physicians that specialize in pediatrics, surgery, obstetrics, orthopedics, psychiatry and other specializing fields of medicine.
The training of medical office assistants varies from the location they are working. Each type of medical office assistant programs will train an individual for a specific function (actually it will depend on the related field of operation the individual wants to work). Some medical assistant programs are “home based” while some are “on line”. Some of these medical assistant programs that are offered on various institutions have “state of the art” training programs that are composed of various modules. These modules important in developing some skills; like for example, the fundamentals on how to operate medical office equipments work, or the basic medical office policies and procedures. It will also train and develop the process of billings and overview of coding. And it will teach students on “health insurance specialization”. Some institutions offer financial aids for their students and job placements for their graduates.
There are some medical office assistant programs that last three to six months. There are some lasts for a year or two (which includes “on the job trainings”). Medical assistants are very much in demand right now. Medical assistants are one of the fastest growing careers in the United States. In 2002 alone, there are about three hundred thousand medical assistants in the United States. The “United States Department of Labor – Bureau of Labor Statistics” stated that medical assisting careers will continue to boom until the year 2012.
The income of a medical assistant depends on the training that the medical assistant underwent, the experience and the location. The annual average income of a medical assistant is 24,000 dollars. Some even earn more (depending on the geographical location).