Gap Year Medical Receptionist vs. Scribing

[Nexus40]

Hello everyone! I am currently in my gap year applying to med school. Just finished my secondaries and looking forward to gaining some great clinical experience during my year off. I am lucky to have gotten two job offers so far.

One of the offers is a scribing job at a local hospital where I'll be working with ER physicians. The other is as a medical receptionist for a retina surgeon, where I'll be doing billing, insurance auths and checking patients in/out.

Which one would you all recommend doing during this gap year?

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[karayaa]

Hello everyone! I am currently in my gap year applying to med school. Just finished my secondaries and looking forward to gaining some great clinical experience during my year off. I am lucky to have gotten two job offers so far.

One of the offers is a scribing job at a local hospital where I'll be working with ER physicians. The other is as a medical receptionist for a retina surgeon, where I'll be doing billing, insurance auths and checking patients in/out.

Which one would you all recommend doing during this gap year?

Congrats on obtaining 2 job offers!
The scribe will give you more of a clinical experience (although the ED is a skewed perspective on medicine, and an outpatient office is arguably more like the "real world" of medicine), but the receptionist will let you smell patients, so it'll count as clinical experience too. So from an application perspective, they're equivalent.
Which is more interesting to you? Which has better hours and better pay? Better benefits? Which is a better fit for your personality? Do you want to be on your feet for 8? 10? 12? hours in an ED, including maybe some night shifts and weekend shifts? Or do you want more of a 9-5 where you can go do something else at the end of the day? Are you interested in health policy and payments and the business side of medicine? Which will give you a better LOR? Can you shadow the retina surgeon (and her/his colleagues?) during year? Can you get involved on research projects with them? Does the ED have research projects?

 

[Robin-jay]

receptionist

 

[Nexus40]

Congrats on obtaining 2 job offers!
The scribe will give you more of a clinical experience (although the ED is a skewed perspective on medicine, and an outpatient office is arguably more like the "real world" of medicine), but the receptionist will let you smell patients, so it'll count as clinical experience too. So from an application perspective, they're equivalent.
Which is more interesting to you? Which has better hours and better pay? Better benefits? Which is a better fit for your personality? Do you want to be on your feet for 8? 10? 12? hours in an ED, including maybe some night shifts and weekend shifts? Or do you want more of a 9-5 where you can go do something else at the end of the day? Are you interested in health policy and payments and the business side of medicine? Which will give you a better LOR? Can you shadow the retina surgeon (and her/his colleagues?) during year? Can you get involved on research projects with them? Does the ED have research projects?

Thanks for getting back to me!

I can definitely get involved in research projects with the retina surgeon (which the ED likely won't have), better LOR, shadowing and $2-$3/hr higher pay. But ED's weirder hours would also let me take a morning Spanish CC class to gain some language skills. I'm also more of a person who likes to be on their feet during the day, and more interested in the patient care side vs. the business side of medicine.

 

[karayaa]

Thanks for getting back to me!

I can definitely get involved in research projects with the retina surgeon (which the ED likely won't have), better LOR, shadowing and $2-$3/hr higher pay. But ED's weirder hours would also let me take a morning Spanish CC class to gain some language skills. I'm also more of a person who likes to be on their feet during the day, and more interested in the patient care side vs. the business side of medicine.

The spanish class sounds like a great idea. Will your ED schedule be consistent enough to take classes for both semestres?
If you work as a receptionist, you'll be able to volunteer with patients during evenings/weekends. I don't know if your ED schedule would let you fit that in.
Personally, the idea of being a scribe is exhausting and a little boring, but that's just based on my EM rotation. I haven't worked as a scribe.

 

[MakeLifeHappen13]

Scribing is much more desirable from an admissions perspective. I learned so much working side by side with physicians and was actually in the room during critical and often life saving procedures and often got to assist on other minor procedures. In my opinion there is no better learning experience for a pre-med than scribing and I would recommend it 1000 times over a receptionist position.

I was asked about this in every single one of my interviews and always had a cool story to tell them when it was brought up. I doubt you will get the same learning experience from a receptionist position and honestly your interviewers are probably not going to care that you learned how to file insurance claims or answer phones.

The downside is that it will be much more stressful than the receptionist position and scribes are often poorly paid. But I wouldn't care too much about that because it is all about the learning experience and actually interacting with patients.

 

[AllBleedingStops]

Well this is just my experience but I suppose that is sort of what you came here for right? I was a scribe (ED) and it was really an excellent experience for my application. I liked the environment (some of my coworkers found they did not like the environment nor did they like medicine so that was valuable for them in a different way). The pay was terrible - unfortunately that is pretty standard and you have to realize that going in.

But more to my point - admissions people loved talking about it. They didn't seem to think it was a problem that I hadn't held dying patients' hands or cleaned up messes or had long deep conversations about the difficulty of obtaining healthcare with patients. They cared much more that I saw what a physician's (at least one specialty) daily life was like including the successes, failures, frustrations, long hours, paperwork (that was a big one), etc. Obviously the exposure to terms, procedures, patients, etc was valuable but they really liked it when I talked about how I got a decent picture of their work life (and a little window into their lives outside medicine) and still wanted to go into the field more than ever.

Side notes - I still found the time for classes, volunteering, and personal/family time despite the irregularity of an EM schedule. Ask me anything else you would like to know.

 

[Warder]

I'd go for scribing. The job isn't the most fun (you're typing on a computer for nearly the entire shift if you're in a busy facility- which is most ERs and clinics!), but you do learn a lot just from doing the charts. A LOT. And that part is pretty interesting.

You generally get to see:
1. The complaint that the patients have and all their symptoms
2. Their relevant medical history to their current complaints
3. The results from the physical exam the Doctor does (usually get to be present for this too)
4. What labs/imaging/interventions the Doctor orders and the results of these tests/interventions
5. The doctor's final thoughts on how they determined what the issue was, what they did, and any further care/treatment the patient may need in the future

The amount of actual care (e.g. suturing, putting a chest tube, etc) you see varies depending on the situation. Most care is provided by the doctor and the nurse without you present (you have a lot of charting to do!), except in emergency cases (stabilization cases off an ambulance where the patient history/charting is done simultaneously with the care being provided). I've found most Doctors are more than happy to let you come in if you've never seen a chest tube put in before, sutures, or a reduction (among numerous other procedures).

The doctors don't dumb anything down for you doing their charts either. You'll learn so much medical terminology. A patient isn't breathing fast, they are tachypneic. They expect you to use this terminology in the charts.

I've also found most doctors are willing to take time to explain things to you if you don't understand something. Why did this lab value make you believe this? Why did you order an MRI for this headache patient when you haven't for the last 40 headaches I've seen with you?

Another thing is you start to see things that doctors do that you dislike and things you really like. One doctor I work with always just walks up to his patients after introducing himself and while the patient is still talking starts his physical exam, often with palpations of what ever part is hurting. It tends to startle the patients. Fantastic doctor other than that, but has taught me that a quick "I'm just going to start examining your stomach, tell me if anything hurts" would go a long way in helping to not startle a patient and make them more comfortable.

I've altogether been surprised at how nice the doctors are to us and how much I've learned. I've shadowed in an ER before becoming a scribe, and while shadowing taught me a lot about a doctor's daily routine and how their day works, I've learned way more about medicine from scribing.

 

[Nexus40]

Hey everyone thanks again for all your input! This helped a ton with my decision making. I've decided to go with the scribing position