Being A Medical Assistant Essay

Being a medical assistant requires skills, qualifications, and becoming certified to perform within the scope of practice. There are many policies and laws for a medical assistant to stay within the scope of practice when dealing with bookkeeping, record keeping, and payroll. While it is important to keep a patient's information confidential, it is also quite important to pay attention to the details, accuracy, and ethical standards of a patient's record. Someone that is a medical assistant has a large amount of tasks that need to be completed along with personal and professional qualities that need to be retained. Although there are many scopes of practice for a medical assistant, the business transactions of a medical office are important.

Bookkeeping should be done daily in a continuous process. All charges and receipts given “should be entered immediately” (Routh 464). Receipts are in duplicates to keep one on file and another to the patient. Any financial activity is recorded and referred to as double-entry bookkeeping as “every transaction affects two accounts by increasing one and decreasing the other” (Routh 464). Each entry is entered twice and these entries are considered debits and credits. When recording financial activity of a business, “any increase in expense (debit) must be offset by a decrease in assets or an increase in liability (credit)” (Routh 464). Any expense for any office supplies decreases cash or increases accounts payable. Each account is assigned a number to enter data in a list of categories “to track the sub-accounts of assets, liabilities, income, expenses, and equity” (Routh 464). This is a way to bookkeep the charts of accounts. The medical assistant has a responsibility of bookkeeping these activities in the medical

When it comes to financial record keeping, it is important to make sure all records are correct. It is essential that a patient's information is entered into a billing record accurately to “ensure that transactions are posted to the proper account” (Routh 430). If information is posted to the wrong account, it would take time to go back through and find the error to correct it when it could have been skipped if the information was correct to begin with. This also would cause issues for both patient's accounts because there would be errors in account balance and billing. Although it may have been a simple error, they are overlooked until “a patient complains that there is a mistake” regarding their account extra charge or a payment (Routh 430). It is easy to make a mistake, but it would have been easier to double check which account it was posted to. The account should have been checked for accuracy, detail, and ethics to ensure that there were not any errors