Medical Assistant
Duties and responsibilities:Administrative duties include: answering telephones, greeting patients, updating and filing patients' medical records, filling out insurance forms, handling correspondence, scheduling appointments, arranging for hospital admission and laboratory services, and handling billing and bookkeeping.
Salary:Medical Assistant: Salary Details. The BLS reports that the median wage for a medical assistant was $29,960 in 2014, up slightly from the prior year. The best-paid 10 percent of medical assistants made more than $42,760, while the bottom 10 percent made less than $21,540.
Education:Clinical trials are research studies that explore whether a medical strategy, treatment, or device is safe and effective for humans. These studies also may show which medical approaches work best for certain illnesses or groups of people.Clinical trials produce the best data available for health care decisionmaking.
Demand or need for this profession:The healthcare industry is one of the few career fields that, despite hard economic woes, is hiring at an alarming rate. Jobs in the medical field are consistently in demand, even in periods of economic downturn. Some medical occupations, however, are expected to grow faster than others. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the six occupations listed in this article will grow the fastest of all medical occupations over the next ten years.