You’re officially taking a gap year. This is your year to brush up on knowledge, improve your resumé, and make an impression on future medical school applications. What will you do, and how will it help you launch your medical career?
Virtual scribing is recognized as a great stepping-stone to frontload your medical school experience. Working as a virtual scribe for AQuity is what the average gap year medical student is looking for: skill building, growth opportunities, and personal connections. AQuity virtual scribes are dedicated, reliable, hard-working, and professional individuals seeking to prove their potential in the medical field.
However, starting your first job in healthcare can be challenging. There’s only so much experience and training undergraduate programs typically provide to prepare you for a role as a virtual scribe. What if you’re not prepared? What exactly are you going to do there? AQuity has your answers:
The Average Day
After getting hired, trained, and paired with a provider, your days as a virtual scribe usually begin with pre-charting. Some people do this the night before, or before signing off from their previous day’s shift. The day starts by connecting with your provider via Microsoft Teams. After you exchange good mornings, it’s time to get down to business. The first task is to review patient list for the day and review any pre-charting (go over patient chart details) for the day’s patients. For the remainder of the shift, scribes listen in on patient encounters and create the provider’s record in the Electronic Health Record.
The patient records are important for the provider’s ongoing care, for the patient, and for the provider’s office billing and revenue cycle management efforts.
Your PCP and You
Speaking of the providers, your communication with your provider is one of the major aspects of being a virtual scribe. Because you support them in a virtual setting, it can seem a bit daunting to try and form a connection. But there’s nothing to worry about. Providers recognize you are there to help them and understand it will take a bit of time as you embark on the first step of your medical career. Both the scribe and the provider will get to know each other as you work together. As you work together, providers typically offer professional advice and share experiences starting out in the medical field. Because of how closely they work together, scribes and providers develop great working relationships and often learn from each other as the scribes help the providers adapt to changing system or regulatory requirements through the proactive support of the AQuity training and operations teams.
In fact, your PCP will be a great connection moving forward. Your relationship grows through mutual communication, trust, and respect. Accordingly, PCPs often serve as references for the next step in your medical career education or future job opportunities.
Skills
Being a scribe will help you learn new skills in medical terminology, bedside manners, and the impact medical reports have on the downstream financial business aspects of practicing medicine. Your typing speed, or words per minute, will increase over time. Due to an understanding of navigating the medical record system, you can be better prepared for its usage in the future. Scribes learn the differences between various documentation elements: subjective and objective notes. You’ll also be exposed to and become familiar with a huge vocabulary list of medical terminology. Your professional communication skills will become honed and your critical thinking skills will get a workout every single day..
These skills are important to develop on their own but working as an AQuity virtual scribe helps you put them in practice daily. Your earned proficiency will transfer well into the next steps in your healthcare career.
As you reach the end of your intended gap year, medical school isn’t your only option. Scribes sometimes appreciate the overall experience and flexibility of the scribe lifestyle, although they instead commit to other career growth opportunities within AQuity. Their new and improved communication skills make them excellent candidates for managerial positions. Your newly gained critical thinking skills could send you down a business route as your professional mannerisms are applicable to more than the medical field.
But if you are simply ready to turn the page and live your dream at medical school, serving as a virtual scribe offers great experience and exposure for pre-med students. The health record skills gained, the strengthening of your medical terminology, your deeper understanding of day-to-day encounter support, all set you up for success in medical school and your future career. Virtual scribing only covers a portion of what’s required to be a front-line care giver, but the experience gained prepares you better than any other Gap Year role for your future.
Conclusion
AQuity is recognized by multiple independent research organizations as the top scribing service in the industry. We have lots to offer gap year medical students that simply can’t be duplicated elsewhere. AQuity is dedicated to quality service and provides the training and support necessary to ensure our scribes are better prepared to begin their role as a virtual scribe so they can perform at the highest level.
You could spend a long time asking what you will do during your gap year. But now that you know what being a virtual scribe entails with AQuity, your next step is to apply and make a difference in your future.
