Not many people know about what does a medical assistant do and may have wrong impression about their duties. In actual fact, medical assistants (MA) play a significance role in the healthcare field and they work with nurses and doctors to ensure the patient's recovery. Their job functions involve a mixture of administrative and clinical task which form the backbone and support for the physician's office.
Types of Medical Assistants
Overall, we can categorized the MA according to the types of work they do and here are the main categories of the different types of medical assistants: Clinical Medical Assistants, Ophthalmic Medical Assistants and Administrative Medical Assistants. Do keep in mind that the job expectations for each of these positions are different and different sets of skills are required.
Clinical Medical Assistants
For Clinical Medical Assistant, the job is normally very demanding and the laws clearly spelled out what they can and cannot do. This is important as their jobs involve humans and no mistakes can be tolerated.
A majority of the duties performed by Clinical Medical Assistant centers on patient care and intake duties. The tasks include getting the patient's medical data and make sure that this data is well do[censored] ented and stored properly. This task is important for the doctor's office as all the patient's medical data can be kept in order and can be easily retrieved at any time. With the assistance of MA, all the patients' visitation record can be stored properly to provide a good guide for future medical reference.
Another vital role of Clinical Medical Assistant is to get patients ready for surgeries. Preparation steps like recording the patient's vital signs and explaining to patients the procedure involved for the operation will all be done by Clinical Medical Assistant.
Administrative Medical Assistant
The main duties of Administrative Medical Assistant is to deal with the papaerwork in the doctor's office. They will be responsible to process all the paperwork involved and deal with the insurance companies. This may involve a lot of tedious work as communication with the respective insurance firms can take up a lot of time and resources.
The Administrative Medical Assistant can also be known as the Office Manager in the doctor's office as they virtually run the whole office on daily basis. They need to ensure that all the office supplies i.e. stationery is sufficient and they also need to help patients to schedule their appointments with doctors. They are also the customer service as they need to deal with queries from patients and most of the time, they are the first to greet patients when they are in the doctor's office.
Specialised Medical Assistants
For doctors specializing in certain areas, they'll need assistants with certain skills as the work done is highly specialized. For example, in the ophthalmic practitioner's office, the assistant are expected to perform specific skills like recording and measuring patient's vision and also assist in diagnostic testing and perform any other tasks as instructed by the specialist doctor.
After reading about some of the specialized areas of medical assistants, you would have some ideas on what does a medical assistant do. If you are still interested in this profession, your first priority will be to check which areas are suitable for you and then take steps and work towards that goal.
