Working in An Urgent Care as a Medical Assistant

Medical Assistants are the backbone of the medical industry. While doctors, nurses, and billers are focusing on how to maintain the health machine, medical assistants are scrambling around all hands on deck on all fronts. From the front desk all the way to drawing blood, medical assistants make sure all of their counterparts are getting what they need to assist as many individuals as possible. Medical assistants are the workers you see when you go into many medical facilities to get the help you need, but today we are going to focus on what is like for medical assistants to work in an urgent care setting.

Why Urgent Cares Are Crowded

Medical assistants can work in a slew of different medical facilities, but oftentimes they are most needed in urgent care settings. Urgent cares are facilities that deal with matters that are not urgent enough for hospitals, but also are more time sensitive then waiting for a doctor's appointment. Oftentimes, doctors at an urgent care ask patients to follow up with their doctor or send them straight to a hospital if matters require it. All recommendations are handled on a case to case basis and due to current matters in regards to American health insurance, urgent cares can often become crowded. This is because if an individual does not have excellent or even any health insurance at all, they end up in urgent care because doctors offices and hospitals are too costly. For this reason, urgent cares need all the help they can get from medical assistants.

Clerical and Clinical Work Medical Assistants Perform

At an urgent care, medical assistants can be working at the front desk. At the front desk they handle all clerical work like answering phones and handling paperwork. Medical assistants are often the first individuals you see at urgent cares while they sit at the front desk. Requiring proper bedside etiquette, they screen patients as they enter and take all the info they need to check them in. This can be a tricky job because depending on what is wrong with the patient, they need the patience and skills to make them feel comfortable and at ease. It’s hard to feel comfortable when you are in pain, and it is up to the medical assistant to let them know they will receive the proper care they need and to ensure that all their information is correto so they can receive that. At the front desk they need to catch any issues with insurance and make sure they are not walking into a situation they can not cover. Medical assistants can also be known to be trained upon employment to handle minor medical billing and coding to assist doctors and insurance companies with that process.

Aside from clerical work, medical assistants will obviously also be focusing on clinical work. The clinical work involves hands on assistance like taking patients vitals and drawing blood. In each medical assistants course, they will have a section that focuses on phlebotomy and this is important because if a doctors hands are tied for a blood test, which is probable at an urgent care, patients will have the proper tools to be able to appropriately get a test vial of blood from a patient while ensuring they are safe. MA’s also assist urgent care doctors with setting up minor procedures. Here they will clean and place the proper sanitized tools down for doctors to get through whatever work they need to perform on a patient.