Finding a job in the medical field doesn’t necessarily mean you need to dedicate up to nine years to schooling, and bounce from practice to practice before landing your own. Before dashing your dreams of working in health care, plenty of careers in health care will still grant you the opportunity to help the people who need it most. However untraditional they may be considered, every career in health care is paramount to providing exceptional patient care.
Nursing
If you’re not sure becoming a doctor is the right path for you, but you have a passion for hands-on patient care, consider attending school for a degree in nursing. The average RN-BSN program takes about three to five years to complete. As a registered nurse, your duties may include a variety of physically intensive responsibilities, as well as providing comfort and information to your patients and their families. Generally, RNs can be found in both hospitals, as well as outpatient clinics, where their job requirements often include administering and monitoring medications and IVs, updating patient records, and educating the patient and the family and/or caregiver on proper after-treatment care.
Medical coding and billing
If your interests don’t exactly lie in one-on-one patient care, but you’re also knowledgeable and capable of navigating the world of insurance and billing, this just might be the perfect position for you. Medical billing relies solely on ICD-10 codes. Your job as either a coder or biller is to work with one another and make sure the patient is receiving treatment that is not only billable to their insurance, but that the tests ordered by the doctor aren’t unneeded. As a coder, ICD-10s will tell you just about everything you need to know. Not only do these codes represent the myriad of diagnoses you may run into, but they help to verify that the tests ordered for the patient are medically necessary.
Medical insurance
If you’re not interested in intimate, in-person patient care, a customer service representative position might be just what you’re looking for. As a medical insurance representative, you’re responsible for making sure your customer’s policy is up-to-date. And call center software for insurance companies can make all the difference. Your success depends on the success of the software used. As long as the common goal between the company you’re working for and the provider is customer satisfaction and rectifying insurance issues, everything should run smoothly. Your customer will rely upon you to recommend the best insurance options available to them that is also relevant to their personal needs.
Patient advocacy
Patient advocacy is the perfect medium between one-on-one patient care and supervising some of the more clerical affairs. The role of a patient advocate may sound as if your sole responsibility is to calm irate patients and their families from contacting department supervisors, but it’s so much more. As a patient advocate, you will not only help people to find the most effective form of treatment, but you can help them to understand the possible limitations set by their insurance as well as maneuvering through the complicated ins and outs of health care. Often, this is a position obtained by those who wants to explore a career path entirely unique to their nursing career.
Of course, just as in any prospective career field, additional requirements and qualifications will be necessary to land your job in health care. Beyond the suggestions we’ve made here, you’ll find hundreds of career options for you to explore that are pertinent to your interests.
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