What is a Medical Assistant Internship Program?

Fundamentally, an internship program in medical assisting is a position that is intended to prepare all medical assistants for the efficient functioning of duties. The interns also gain essential knowledge so as to help the health care providers both in the front and back office tasks. Once trained, the medical assisting intern’s are anticipated to function on their own. As a major element of the medical assistant internship program, the intern’s are trained to grant back office assistance along with several other day after day duties such as, accompanying the patients to the health examination rooms of the doctor’s office, noting down the vital symptoms and body weight of the patients and so on.

Once the medical assistance interns start to perform well in representing their competency, they will be allowed to perform on their own. What’s more, they will gain the capacity or ability to convert into a professional medical assistant. An intern will be taught about the accountability of granting an unswerving connection between the health care provider and the patients. This is taught by making sure that the concerns and questions of the patients have been dealt by the right health care provider.

Scope and nature of the medical assistant internship

A medical assistant intern will be trained in the front and back office duties of a doctor’s clinic. In addition, they are trained to do the following tasks efficiently:

• Accompany the patient from the waiting room to the health examination room on time.
• Recording vital signs as per the guiding principles.
• Filing or acquiring each and every communication (contact) details of all patients and faxing their prescription stock up’s in a timely manner.
• Organizing the lab samples for further processing.
• Filling the essential referral forms and receiving approvals for medical appointments in allocating cases and maintaining the testimonials of the same.
• Preparing all patients for health check up.
• Receiving and making phone calls in the order of highly needed same day appointments with the doctors and physicians.
• Documenting proper official procedures into the patients medical records to become an element of their permanent health records.

All medical assistant interns should use relations, interpersonal skills work ethics, and professionalism while working together with patients of various ages and ethnicity, their family members, physicians, doctors, staff’s in physician work place and several other health care units in the true gathering of clinical, demographic, and economic information either face-to-face or by means of the telephone or video conferences if needed.

Important tasks during internship program

In general, a medical assistant intern have power over a ‘full of zip’ responsibilities in lessening the receivables of financial statements through knowledge gathering and by following the time-honored guiding principles, rules and regulations, course of actions and dealings for the duration of the registration procedure in the following aspects both accurately and truthfully. They are:

• Acquiring and entering the demographic, medical, economic information into the work place’s mainframe (computer) system in a clear-cut manner.
• Elucidating and getting signatures on the medical and monetary forms.
• Classifying the sources of the insurance payers.
• Categorizing the series of orders placed by the payers.
• Authenticating eligibility criteria of the insurance.
• Getting hold of insurance notification.
• Payment processing for order entry.
• Finding out the anticipated charge of services being provided.
• Spot-out and gather the total amounts of patient monetary responsibilities. For example, the co-indemnity, co-fees, deductibles etc.
• Manuscript all essential information that is collected in a timely and proper manner along with the reference to the concerned department’s needs.

In point of fact, the medical assistance internship program will keep a candidate ‘shoulder to shoulder’ of all principles in order to guarantee a conformity with central, state and local authoritarian organizations. In addition, medical assistant interns also learn to ensure compliance with the third party or intermediary repayment policies. The medical assisting intern position also endows with proper patient care.

Challenges faced by a medical assisting intern

Some of the challenges in this position may arise by means of innovative procedures for patient care, office procedures, rules and regulations, alteration of the standard system, health department and sanatorium policy changes, amplified data existing on each and every patient and rise & fall in recruitment processes.

Minimum requirements

Candidates who wish to take up an internship program in medical assisting should possess working-scale of knowledge in several areas such as the proper English skills with writing & speaking. It is also expected that a medical assisting intern possesses adequate arithmetical skills.

Conclusion

The preceding description or general idea about a medical assistant internship is not anticipated and must not be interpreted to be a comprehensive inventory of all job responsibilities, work skills and unique efforts or job ‘state of affairs’ that are associated with the internship post. On the whole, this outline should be considered as a general overview that describes a true manifestation or mirror image of the common nature, scope, work responsibilities, challenges and educational requirements of the medical assisting internship position.