MA Interview - Alison Stotts

Self introduction

My name is Alison and I am a 5th year undergraduate student at UC San Diego. I am currently a board member for PPASO acting as one of the Co-Public Relations Coordinators. I will graduate this June with an Aerospace Structural Engineering degree and then begin taking prerequisites for PA school!

What is a MA?

A Medical Assistant is a healthcare professional that works alongside doctors, typically in a smaller clinic or outpatient setting. You can work in the front office, back office, or combination of the two. As a front office medical assistant, you are the front face of the clinic, which means you will likely be the first person the patient see’s when walking in and you represent the clinic’s first impression. When working in the front office, you will likely handle appointment scheduling and answer patient inquiries, fax medical documents, manage payments, and verify insurance. As a back office medical assistant, your job is to room patients, take their vital signs, update charts for the physician, and prepare any procedures to be completed (like vaccinations, covid testing, minor surgeries, stitches removal, etc). You will be much more hands on with patients and this will likely count as patient care experience depending on your desired PA school’s requirements. It is always a good idea to check with each individual school and keep a detailed list of what they qualify as PCE vs HCE. A combination medical assistant means you manage both checking the patients in and making sure they have all the documents and payments taken care of prior to the appointment, and then room them in the back where you perform the duties of a back office MA.

How do you become an MA?

If you are lucky, you might be able to find a job without needing to have completed a program or taken a certification exam. You can find jobs for all sorts of medical careers on PPASO’s Facebook Page as well as Craigslist, the Jobs & Internships Facebook site, Indeed, and occasionally Handshake. I personally completed a 10-week program with International Health Group (IHG) which was the fastest and cheapest program I could find. Most Medical Assistant programs can be 20-24 Months and cost around $50,000 if not more; whereas IHG only cost me like $2,100 and I even got a job out of it (although it’s not a guarantee, sometimes you can be hired by your externship site). To explain that further, the IHG program was half online and half in person. It was two 3-hour online class sessions per week and one 5-hour lab session in-person per week (where you practice different medical procedures). After you’ve completed all 10-weeks of instruction, you are assigned to an externship site (a medical office of some kind, for me it was a pediatric clinic) to complete 160 hours of voluntary work at the clinic where you get to practice your newly learned skills in a real world setting. I would like to add that the 160 hours can take you as long as you want to complete. For example, you can finish in 4 weeks working 8-hour shifts 5 days a week, or you can work a shift whenever you are available until you reach 160 hours. I personally worked one 8-hour Saturday shift and the occasional Tuesday and Thursday until I reached 160 hours (it took me like 3-4 months). After completing the 160 hours at the externship site, if the physicians/employers liked you and believed you to be a good fit for the practice, they may officially hire you without having to take the California State Certification Exam. While taking the exam does open up more opportunities to find a Medical Assistant job and get paid more, in the state of California, it is not required for you to work as a Medical Assistant.

What are some of your job duties / what does a typical work day look like?

I currently work at two different Pediatric Clinics. I am a combination MA at both clinics which means I schedule patient appointments, prepare patient charts, handle patient inquiries, answer phones, deal with insurance, manage payments, take vital signs, administer injections, perform vision and audio exams, and a few other miscellaneous tasks. My ultimate purpose is to best prepare the patient for the doctor and alleviate some of the minor tasks a physician has to do.

What do you dislike the most about your job?

Depending on the clinic, you may be stuck at the front office for a while before you are trained for the back office and this can be frustrating because your employment tasks can consist of administrative duties that you may not have signed up for. I know I personally wanted to start gaining hands on experience with patients rather than handle billing and taking phone calls, but what I will say is that if you do end up working as a combination MA, it is a really good idea to fully understand the front office tasks because it makes it so much easier to help the patients and make the office flow faster and easier. It is important for the front office and back office medical assistants to have good communication with one another because your jobs directly impact one another, so even if you start off in the front, remember that what you are doing is important even if it doesn’t feel like it right away.

What do you like most about your job?

I enjoy the patient interaction, my coworkers, and the physicians. Working as a medical assistant gives great insight to what it might be like to be a Physician Assistant in the future. It allows you to have outpatient clinic experience and interact with patients on a deeper level than a scribe or EMT might have. I enjoy working with the patients and providing them with the respect and care I wish I had received when going to the doctors myself. Typically MA’s are the first person you see when you go to the doctors and they can really set the tone of what the appointment will be like. If a patient is nervous to be at the doctors it’s always nice to be able to give them a warm welcome and a smiling face to make them feel more at ease. Getting to know the Physicians is a huge plus too because you’ll get to experience their day to day life and get to know their backgrounds as well. They worked really hard to be where they are at in life and it can be very rewarding to learn from them and prepare for your future. Your coworkers might also be Pre-PA and it’s a great way to make friends and work together or inspire one another to accomplish your pre-PA goals.

Conclusion

Many times I have heard the question, what’s the best job for pce hours? I too have asked this question, and my answer is “it depends”. Each school has its own definition of what patient care experience is and truthfully the best advice I can give is to do your research and make an excel sheet or google doc that compares each of the schools you are interested in and write down what they think is the best way to obtain pce. A lot of the schools I am considering believe that a medical assistant is a great way to obtain patient care experience AND health care experience, and I agree with that statement. If you work a combination shift like I do, you can accumulate both types of experiences by working with patients and managing the front office tasks. Can being an MA be stressful? Absolutely, just like any job can be! But if you enjoy the medical field, then usually the stress dissipates once you get a good grasp on how to handle certain situations. Another question I get asked a lot is how can I find a part time MA position? And my answer to that is simply growing your connections and applying EVERYWHERE. I have found that getting to know people can be a very rewarding experience and I have been able to get jobs this way. I also spent my fair share of time applying to places too and have definitely gotten lucky! I would say, even though a position is listed as Full-Time, you should still apply for it because you never know when someone may be willing to hire the right candidate as a part time employee. If you have any questions that I did not get to answer, please do feel free to reach out to me and I’ll happily answer them! Use me a resource and grow your connections :D