Do you remember what it was like being a child? Growing up, going to preschool or kindergarten and then grade school? Or maybe you were home-schooled, I don’t know- I always thought that would be fun, but I thought that meant we would get to play all day and not have to do homework.
When we’re just children, adults ask us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I know that this is a question to get kids motivated about a career or a path in their life, but almost never does one child say he wants to be a policeman, actually grow up and become one. I wanted to be a zoologist, or an explorer that traveled to rainforests and examined ancient temples and artifacts. I like sci-fi, maybe if I had known the terms, “xenoarchaeology” or “xenology”, I would have wanted to be an astronaut more. These are fictional words of course; they were created in science fiction stories to explain exploring alien civilizations or alien life- but they make perfect sense to me.
Another interest I have is with diseases, I don’t really go out of my way to learn more about them, but maybe I should. I’m in the Health Information Technology program, which is basically medical records, but so much more. HIT is responsible for organizing records, do statistics for state and federal programs, to make sure everyone in their department are following laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which includes the Privacy Act- basically so your medical information is safe and secure, and many other laws. HIT is also responsible for digging through a patient’s medical notes, assembling information on diagnoses and procedures to send to insurances for reimbursement and charges.
I first became interested in this line of work when I started working at UI QuickCare as a receptionist- they now call us “Patient Services Specialists”, but we didn’t receive any extra training, so I can’t help but laugh a little bit at the ridiculous nature of it. When I first started, I worked at the Southeast Family Care Clinic. They had after hours for the QuickCare clinic, and used paper medical records. This interested me, as the records had sections for; demographics, lab results, visit notes and many more for various different reasons. Some were teeny tiny for patients who didn’t visit often or were new, some were very thick and needed more than one record to contain all the paperwork inside.
After I had worked with QuickCare for about six or nine months, they implemented an electronic record, which means they mostly didn’t use the paper records anymore, any notes made would be typed or transcribed into an electronic format, as would lab results and everything else a paper record had kept. Around this time, they also opened the new eastside location that had full time hours, and so we stopped using the Southeast clinic, and I also became a full time staff member shortly thereafter.
Working full time there, I learned more about what it was like to work in an clinical office; we needed to scan certain paperwork into patients medical records, or print out records and fax them to patients doctors, we would need to have patients sign a Release Consent form if they wanted personal copies of their medical records, and many other small details that come with working in any clinic.
The computer program we use fascinated me at first, I wanted to know all the tricks- it took little time for me to realize that even though I had access to the program, since I was just the PSS, I wouldn’t need to learn how to make orders for procedures or need to add a lab result. But actually taking time to look around did give me an advantage from my peers at work. Some of the PSS still had issues months after training because they didn’t take the time to actually look around or click the help button if they were unsure.
I have various ideas about what I would like to do after I graduate, but I haven’t decided on specifics yet. I think I would love to work at the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia- and I have checked on this, I would need some experience under my belt before I would even be considered to work there. So instead I want to get a job in the health information field, either with abstracting, data entry or probably anything that sounds interesting, I still haven’t made up my mind. After a while, though, I would like to train for cancer registry. This includes extra training where I would receive a certificate when I’m done, and would be able to do cancer statistics at work along with tracking of population outbreaks and patient treatments, this is also submitted (I believe) to the CDC. Eventually I would like to work in a federal building, though.
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