Are you interested in becoming a medical assistant but not sure the best way to join your healthcare colleagues? After finishing the medical assisting program at CyberTex, you will be ready to join healthcare’s frontline. You will have a strong foundation to build upon throughout your career. So, what does a medical assistant do?
What Does a Medical Assistant Do?
Medical assistants are allied health professionals who manage a broad range of clinical and administrative duties in healthcare settings. They support doctors, nurses and administrators in private practices, clinics, and hospitals. As frontline healthcare workers, medical assistants keep healthcare offices running smoothly by bridging the data gap between the office and the exam room.
What Are a Medical Assistant’s Clinical Responsibilities?
Medical assistants are versatile support professionals with administrative duties, but it’s their clinical expertise that sets them apart from medical office assistants. How do they contribute to the healthcare team? Let’s review a medical assistant’s many clinical responsibilities.
As members of the healthcare team, you will support licensed staff by performing essential clinical tasks that require some training, such as:
Rooming Patients
After patients check in, you will escort them to an exam or treatment area, using the time to establish communication and make clinical observations. You may stop along the way to take the patient’s height and weight or perform a visual screening. Once in the exam room, you may help patients prepare for the exam by offering clothes to change into and wrapping up a few clinical and clerical tasks.
Updating Health Records
You will update the patient’s health records before the provider arrives, reconciling their medication and allergy lists so that doctors have the most current information with which to make treatment decisions.
Taking Vital Signs
Pulse, temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and peripheral oxygen saturation are important measures of overall health. Doctors track trends for years so they can recognize risk factors for chronic diseases. Unexpected changes can indicate illness, so consistency and accuracy are essential.
Performing Diagnostic Tests
Once done only in hospitals, simple diagnostic tests such as an electrocardiogram or urinalysis can be performed in an office setting. It’s a source of revenue for private practices and a convenience for patients. You are trained to perform these tests without immediate supervision, making you a valuable asset in specialty practices.
Phlebotomy
As a medical assistant, you are also trained to draw venous blood samples. In large practices, you may spend your days in the lab performing phlebotomy. It’s a surprisingly easy but technical skill that requires steady hands, sound clinical judgment and good communication skills. You’ll learn the ropes in a vocational school program and will have the opportunity to practice before you graduate. Don’t be intimidated.
Assisting with Procedures
Like diagnostic tests, minor surgical procedures such as biopsies, are increasingly being performed in doctor’s offices. You’ll serve as an extra pair of hands, preparing equipment, passing instruments, and monitoring the patient during the process.
Performing Treatments
Complex treatments are the domain of doctors and nurses, but as a medical assistant, you can assist with some tasks on stable patients. Examples include changing dry bandages and removing sutures.
Infection Control
Infection control is less of a task than an overarching responsibility to keep patients safe from contagious disease. As a medical assistant, you’ll incorporate infection control principles in everything you do from disinfecting exam rooms and shared equipment between patients to sterilizing instruments used in surgical procedures.
Patient Education
You are the doctor’s liaison, entrusted with reinforcing the patient’s treatment plan. You can’t independently dispense health advice, but you can help patients better understand their provider’s recommendations. As the doctor’s representative, you’ll be an educator, talking to patients about timely health topics from how to prepare for an upcoming procedure to medication safety.
What Are a Medical Assistant’s Clerical Responsibilities?
Medical assistants are valued for their unique blend of clinical and administrative skills. They’re trained in office procedures from billing to recordkeeping, yet it’s rare for them to perform exclusively administrative tasks. Often, their clerical responsibilities are related to their clinical duties. Examples include:
Scheduling
Front office assistants handle most routine scheduling in healthcare offices, but when it comes to procedures and urgent care appointments, medical assistants are better trained to know how long exams take, what type of equipment is required, and which staff members should be involved. As a medical assistant, you’re unlikely to handle all the scheduling, but you’ll help manage resources.
Stocking Shelves
It’s part clinical and part clerical task. It’s a medical assistant’s responsibility to keep exam rooms fully stocked. Clinical expertise is necessary to know which items, from tongue depressors to cotton balls are needed to treat patients. But knowledge of clerical and ordering procedures is a must to manage inventory.
Managing Records
Among your most crucial roles is managing health records. Accurate recordkeeping is a must for continuity of care, so you’ll update paper and computerized charts to ensure that critical information isn’t missed. In a vocational school program, you’ll learn how to access, update and store electronic records securely.
Billing and Coding
Billing and coding activities are integrated into everything you do. Billing and coding specialists handle most of the accounting and insurance paperwork, but from scanning supplies into an inventory control system to recording the use of medication or bandages during an exam, you’ll have an indirect role.
Filing and Other General Office Procedures
Healthcare offices are busy places, so when the paperwork stacks up, it’s all hands on deck. From faxing and filing to answering the phone and penning correspondence, you should always be ready to lend a hand.
Skills for Success as a Medical Assistant
Medical assistants aren’t born, they’re made. Having certain qualities is useful, but vocational school training will help you cultivate the skills you need to be successful. The best medical assistants are:
Compassionate
Compassion is the drive to help those in need. That’s your focus as a medical assistant, so a natural desire to ease people’s suffering is a plus.
Empathetic
Empathy is the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. It’s foundational to mutual respect and effective communication. Not everyone has an innate ability to be empathetic, but in most cases, it’s because they don’t understand the events that cause people to suffer. Without clinical training, it’s hard to comprehend patients’ emotional responses to illness, but you’ll learn about that and more in your vocational school program.
Effective Communicators
Whether it’s with patients or colleagues, you will spend much of your day communicating with others. But more than the ability to speak or write confidently, communication in healthcare is therapeutic and requires assessing non-verbal communication like body language. It takes practice, but as a medical assistant, you’ll get plenty of it.
Excellent Time Manager
Hectic days can be stressful but being able to make the most of your time prevents it from becoming overwhelming. But don’t worry if you’re not a good time manager yet because there are tools and tips to help keep you on track. You learn about them in a vocational school program.
Flexible
As a medical assistant, you will have many responsibilities and must feel comfortable shifting focus on a dime. No two days in a healthcare setting are ever alike, so being able to jump from a clinical to a clerical task or respond to emergencies without losing focus is a plus.
Positive
No one enjoys being around pessimistic personalities. In a healthcare environment, patients already have enough reason to be down, they want to surround themselves with people. No one can be happy all the time, especially in the face of illness, but it helps to be optimistic and smile.
How Do You Become a Medical Assistant?
An easy way to become a medical assistant is to attend a vocational school program. You can opt to get a diploma or degree, depending on your timetable and the upward mobility you seek in your career. Students benefit from a comprehensive curriculum and graduate work ready.
Final Thoughts
As the healthcare industry grows, the demand for medical assistants is increasing. So why not turn your aptitude for science and administration into a future forward career with a vocational school diploma or degree? You bring the hard work and compassion, and we supply the rest.
Want to Learn More?
Ready to learn more about becoming a medical assistant in Central Texas? The Medical Assistant Training Program at CyberTex Institute of Technology takes great care of every student providing hands-on training, practical experience and support it takes to get started in a medical assisting career without spending years in school. Students learn the basics of both clinical and administrative skills. Clinical skills include but are not limited to the following: taking medical histories, preparing patients for examinations, assisting the physician during the exam, collecting, and preparing laboratory specimens, drawing blood, and taking electrocardiograms.
Contact us today to learn more about our Austin and Killeen campuses.