Medical Assistant's Duties

Medical assistant's duties include clinical and administrative tasks, such as answering telephones, checking appointments, arranging laboratory services, photocopying medical records, and handling billing and bookkeeping tasks. This goes hand-in-hand with obtaining demographic information from patients that arrive for their appointment. Also, organizing the patient's medical records and taking them into the clinical area for check-ups, exams, or treatments is part of the daily routine.

Steve Verno, a certified medical biller in Florida recently told us: "Doctors can be tricky in their wants and desires. Some have been burned badly by a previous employee, so they don't want that to happen again." The certification bodies have established standards of practice for medical assistants, and disciplinary measures for violations. When complaints are filed against a certified, or registered medical assistant, it will be investigated and appropriately dealt with. A medical office hiring a CMA, or RMA can request the applicant's status and verify their credentials.

Your Certification is Important!

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Attitude and Dependability

The medical assistant's main duty is to support health care providers in all areas of the medical office, and practice. Their taking care of essential administrative and clinical tasks allows the doctor to focus directly on the patient's medical and health concerns without being bogged down by daily office maintenance routines.

Attitude: Whenever the medical assistant interacts with others communication must be carried out in a honest and compassionate manner, while treating everybody equally with understanding, dignity, caring, and kindness! A general attitude of friendliness and empathy can go a long way.

Dependability: Doctors and patients expect their medical assistants to be reliable, skillful, truthful, trustworthy, efficient, and confident.

Administrative Responsibilities

Most medical assistants in the administrative areas are asked to check on insurance claims, and referrals, and review encounter forms. However, when it comes to medical billing and coding procedures for reimbursement it is important to know CPT and ICD-9 codes. A medical assistant with coding and billing responsibilities would benefit greatly from additional training before getting involved with this rather complex process. Lack of knowledge could easily hurt the provider and the patient and could also lead to a possible audit, fines, loss of license, or sanctions from Medicare and Medicaid.

Steve tells us: "The doctor may be the one to select the codes, however, when placing the codes on the claim form, and you don't know what you are doing, you could assign the wrong ICD-9 code to the wrong CPT code. In addition, you might not properly fill out the claim form causing the claim to be denied payment - causing a loss of revenue to the provider, the provider's staff, and you. If the claim is improperly denied, not having the right training may cause you to bill a patient and possibly violate a State or Federal Law."

MA15Years tells us: "Care for your patients as it was your mother, your father, grandmother etc., and you will have happy patients, which trickles down to happy co-workers. And most, and foremost, treat others the way you want to be treated and be proud of your title, yourself, and your accomplishments."

More on the Medical Billing Community Forum.