What Skills Do You Need to be a Medical Assistant?
When it comes to choosing a path, many people consider the healthcare industry for the fulfillment that caring for people provides. However, if you don't want to go through the years and years of education that it takes to become a doctor, you could consider pursuing a role as a medical assistant. If this is the case, then you'll want to know what it takes, both in terms of learned skills and personal skills, to become a successful medical assistant.
What is a Medical Assistant?
Medical assistants have a wide variety of responsibilities, from administrative tasks to clinical tasks, making them extremely important to the health care industry as a whole.
If you complete a medical assistant program, you might have the opportunity to work in many different work environments. These include family practices, hospitals, outpatient clinics, diagnostic labs, medical research centers, and more.
What Skills Should You Learn?
Medical assistants may not have the responsibility that doctors have, but that doesn't mean that they don't need to be intimately familiar with medical terminology and practices. The following are some of the important skills that you will must learn to become a medical assistant:
- Being familiar with medical terminology
- The ability to prepare patients for examinations
- The ability to help physicians perform their examinations
- Drawing blood and preparing samples for lab tests
- Taking and recording vital signs, including blood pressure
- Maintaining medical records as well as billing and coding data for insurance
- Providing injections to patients
- Providing medications to patients
- Performing CPR
- Performing an EKG
What Personal Skills Should You Have?
The following are some of the personal skills that you'll need in order to be successful as a medical assistant. These are certainly skills that you can develop over time and through your education and training.
- Social Skills - Not only will you be dealing with physicians who may not have a lot of patience at the end of a 16-hour shift (which in turn requires you to practice patience and keep any emotions you might have in check as you follow their instructions), but you'll be dealing with patients regularly, too. Social skills are an absolute must in this field because you need to be able to make patients feel comfortable and safe. If they're worried about anything, you'll need to help settle them down and make them less worried. In fact, you may need to speak with the families of patients, who may be stressed out and on edge. Good social skills could help keep situations from boiling over.
- Organizational Skills - Medical assistants are often required to record information, handle patient documents, and deal with insurance. All of these tasks are extremely important. If you're unorganized, it could cause all kinds of potential problems. For example, insurance claims could be denied or physicians may not have access to the patient medical histories they need to properly diagnose patients or prescribe treatment in an efficient manner.
- Communication Skills - You will need to be able to provide information to patients in a way that they can understand it, whether it's preparing them for an examination or explaining a procedure. You will also need good listening skills when dealing with both patients, physicians and nurses.
Completing a Medical Assisting Program
Obtaining a medical assisting degree could help teach you the skills you'll need to know in order to succeed as a medical assistant wherever you end up working. A good program should also focus on helping you to develop the personal skills that are important to becoming a good medical assistant by not only providing a classroom education, but by providing clinical experience as well.
Some of the classes that a reputable medical assisting program should offer include courses focusing on medical terminology, medical coding and billing, medical office procedures, medical ethics, patient intake, laboratory procedures, pharmacology, diagnostics and testing, EKG technician and cardiology, and more.
A competent program will also set you up for success by preparing you for the CMA (AAMA) Exam and by helping you obtain a medical assisting externship.
If you have an interest in pursuing a future in healthcare that is personally fulfilling then you should consider becoming a medical assistant - especially if the personal skills necessary to succeed as a good medical assistant are skills that you already have.
If you're thinking about earning an Associate of Applied Science in Health Science with a Focus in Medical Assisting, ECPI University offers this course at an accelerated rate. For more information about this exciting degree, connect with a skilled admissions advisor today.
It could be the Best Decision You Ever Make!
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