Medical Support Assistant

About the role

Performs duties related to the receipt, intake and indexing of health and administrative information. MSA's will interface with personal computer applications as well as numerous Vista applications. The MSA is responsible for scheduling appointments, including interpreting and verifying provider orders in accordance with VHA national scheduling guidelines.

Responsibilities

• Provides advisory and technical assistance to Veterans and beneficiaries who come to the medical center seeking medical care, experiencing problems or requesting information.
• Coordination of all administrative activities in the immediate area and providing support and assistance to the staff.
• Processing hospital admissions, clinic appointments, registration of patients, and workload data validation.
• Managing consults, recall reminders, view alerts, mod sheets, and encounters for assigned specialty clinics.
• Ensuring all consults are resolved within seven days and encounters are resolved daily.
• Scheduling appointments and providing information regarding unit, clinic, and hospital policies, procedures, and locations to patients, family members, staff, etc.
• Maintaining and monitoring patient appointment schedules for the unit/clinic and communicating delays in scheduled appointments to the appropriate staff and patients.
• Monitoring clinic and operating room utilization, making necessary adjustments to support the needs of the clinic, and facilitating the scheduling of procedures and testing performed by other services.
• Providing a detailed daily report to the Medical Administration Service leadership, including missed opportunities, consults, encounters, unsigned notes and orders, and any other clinic issues that arise.
• Performing administrative follow-up actions.
• Participating in team meetings to manage and plan patient care, independently sharing information and collaborating with the medical team to assure continuity of care, setting priorities and deadlines, estimating and reporting on expected milestones for completion of tasks, communicating team success in performance goals, and reporting progress to the supervisor.
• Maintaining the status on work progress and making adjustments in accordance with established priorities. Obtaining assistance from supervisors as needed for major issues or problems that arise.
• Safeguarding sensitive information against unauthorized disclosures.

Requirements

• English Language Proficiency: Candidates must be proficient in spoken and written English in accordance with 38 U.S.C. § 7403(f).
• May qualify based on being covered by the Grandfathering Provision as described in the VA Qualification Standard for this occupation (only applicable to current VHA employees who are in this occupation and meet the criteria).
• Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs): Knowledge of basic medical terminology to assist in the provision of care to patients; skill in recording patient messages and understanding physician requests pertaining to follow-up medical care in internal or external clinics; ability to meet, communicate, and interact with individuals from varying backgrounds and other health care team members in a courteous and helpful manner in order to facilitate medical care for patients; ability to use, and navigate between, various types of office automation equipment and software (i.e., computer systems, web-based scheduling programs; insurance collection system; scanning software, multiple line phone systems; electronic faxing programs) to support patient care.

Qualifications

• Medical Support Assistant, GS-3: Experience or Education.
• Medical Support Assistant, GS-4: Experience or Education.
• Medical Support Assistant, GS-5: Experience or Education.