My first trip to America was when I was 15. I spent some time in Santa Barbara, CA to study English. Then, I went back to Korea and moved back to America completely when I turned 20. Since English is not my mother language, whenever I am in an environment or situations which I have never experienced before, I always have to challenge myself to learn new words in English. I’ve come a long way since I was fifteen, when I started learning English in school in the US. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more outside of the classroom, where I’ve had to use reading and writing to learn in the medical field when I started working as a medical transcriptionist.
If I thought learning “regular” English was hard, learning the jargon connected with the medical field was even more daunting, but I always dreamed of working in the medical field and that dream came true when I started working with two physicians. One is a family physician and the other is a gastroenterologist. From day one, I had to learn how to read and write medical paper works and documentations with which I hardly had any previous experience.
Even though I took a medical terminology class, I realized that the work experience is important because I learned that in the work environment, it’s not only about the medical terminology but also about the policies, authorizations, eligibilities, claims, etc. of thousands of different insurance companies based on Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, regulations.
These days, every medical employer has to work with new electronic medical record systems per CMS regulations. So the office where I was working also started making electronic medical records. It’s challenging to create an electronic chart because transcriptionists or administrators have to actually transcribe or rewrite based on the physicians’ diagnoses or progress notes. For example, if the patient came in with a migraine headache and the physician wrote the diagnosis on the progress note,...