Lee Doubleday: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Imagine America Radio. This is our first episode of our Medical Assistant Awareness Month. Joining us today is Shibu Thomas, the executive vice president of marketing admissions for Ross Education. For those of you who don’t know, Ross Medical Education Center was founded in Flint, Michigan, in 1969. Today, Ross is accredited by the Accrediting Bureau of Health Education Schools and offers programs in some of the fastest-growing fields in the health care industry. This includes medical assistant, medical insurance billing and office administration, dental assistant, pharmacy technician, veterinary assistant, occupational therapy assistant, nursing, practical nursing, veterinary technology, and business management programs—with over 40 Ross Medical Education Centers and over 50 years of providing quality education. We couldn’t think of anyone better to join us today on this episode discussing the future of medical assistant careers than Shibu Thomas with Ross Education. Mr. Thomas, thanks for joining us today.

Shibu Thomas: Well, thank you very much, Lee. It’s great to have you guys sit there and talk about the medical assistant program to all of your viewers and listeners. I’m really excited to be here on this podcast with you.

Lee: Awesome. Awesome. All right, Mr. Thomas, let’s start out by telling our listeners exactly what a medical assistant is. Can you briefly explain what a medical assistant does?

Shibu: Sure, Lee. A medical assistant is a health care professional who works alongside doctors and nurses and other health care [inaudible]. Medical assistants are also found in a lot of physicians’ offices, hospitals, clinics, and a variety of other locations. In some larger facilities, they’re oftentimes specialized in one particular area—whether it’s clinical or administrative—and in smaller practices, a medical assistant will be found doing things like administrative work, clinical tasks, and helping to keep the office run very smoothly.

Lee: Now, when you say administrative tasks—now I have heard that medical assistants actually do draw blood. Am I right? I mean, is that something that they typically asked of—?

Shibu: Yeah, they do. They do phlebotomy, which is what the technical term is. They take blood. They know how to test blood, and they know how to pass medication through injections—through the arm and hip—and they do dosage calculations, things like that. So, definitely, it’s one aspect of the medical assistant program.

Lee: Awesome. All right, now that we sort of discussed what a medical assistant does, what does a career outlook look like for medical assistants, maybe on a national level?

Shibu: So, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the American government that’s published, medical assistant careers are expected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations out there currently. By 2029, it’s projected there will be a need to hire over 864,000 medical assistants across the country. And unfortunately, this past year and a half of this pandemic, what you’ve seen is a lot—like first responders and people who are on the front lines fighting this type of, what I call, obstacle for this entire country and for individual families. And we will have more of this in the future. This is not like a once-and-for-all thing. And I don’t want to break off the subject, but you will need to have more medical professionals in the field as we face more and more of these type of issues that we’re going to have because of viruses out there. And the more people that we have doing these type of things—helping in the hospitals, helping in the clinics, helping your neighborhood clinic, or volunteering as needed—this type of profession is going to be in huge demand. And I’ll tell you right now: a lot of our students, when they do this medical assisting program, look at it from a career standpoint—a lot of the aspects that they see about the career also impacts their family life. I mean, if you’re a medical assistant that’s trained professionally, when your child is sick or something happens in your family, you have a much better understanding of not only what to do, but what process to take to handle those type of situations. So, to me, it’s a win-win situation, not only for your family life or your career professionally, but also from a civic duty standpoint. I also think this is a profession that you’re really giving of yourself to put someone else’s health first.

Lee: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I would just like to echo those statements. I think that it’s an admirable career path, really. And it’s funny what you mentioned about how it impacts your family life. It’s almost like having a friend who’s good at working on cars. Everybody wants that friend, right, because when your car breaks down, you need some assistance. The only thing I would add to what you said was that another reason why this career path is growing so much is because the older generation is going to need us to take care of them. And I just think that health care careers in general just seem to be growing for that reason that you mentioned right there, which is there are viruses and things that are happening right now that are timely, but it is also the older population that is aging—and forcing people into retirement that opens a lot more doors as well.

Shibu: I wish we were all immortal, right?

Lee: Yeah, right. Exactly.

Shibu: Eventually, everyone is going to need some sort of health care, whether it’s in the middle of your life or near the end of your stay here, so I think it’s very, very critical that this—and it’s critical that you need medical professionals, but it’s going to be a necessity and I think you summed it up best, especially with our growing population.

Lee: Yeah, yeah. So, something that I know that we see, at least on Imagine America’s side, as far as—students being awarded scholarships to get into medical assisting sometimes come back to us looking for scholarships to get into nursing school, and is that something that you see on your end as well? Is medical assisting really a great place to start to see if a career in the health care industry is for you?

Shibu: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that makes what I call our stint into the health care from a starting point medical assisting—you have medical assisting is usually what I would consider a jumping point, and you can go from medical assisting—you can get an associate’s degree in medical assisting. You can continue on, if you feel that the health care industry is what you want, for nursing and things that. But it really gives you an appetizer in a way of, if this is something you want to move forward with, but it also gives you a career. So, it’s not something that’s so insignificant that you can’t make a lifelong commitment to it and build something for yourself, but it’s also a great launching platform for you to do more things with your life as you need.

Lee: That’s great. Well, with medical assistants being in such high demand, it seems something worth getting an education in, so I have sort of a three-parted question for you. Number one, should someone go to school to learn how to become a medical assistant? I think that answer is pretty obvious.

Shibu: Yes.

Lee: Number two, what does a typical program include? And how long is a typical medical assistant program?

Shibu: Okay, so now, when you talk about the medical assisting program, you’re basically talking about the certification program initially. There is also an associate’s degree program medical assisting, which we also provide online if you want, but basically the medical assisting program is a nine-month certification program, and it’s broken down into two sections. And I kind of briefly summarized some of it earlier on in our conversation. But it’s broken down into clinical and administrative. And on the clinical side, like I stated, you will learn phlebotomy, how to test blood, dosage calculations, wound care, sterilization of instruments and wounds, tests—strep, mono test, blood sugar test, urinalysis. You get specialties like how to properly weigh, measure, and take the vital signs of an infant. How to administer an eye exam using an eye chart. And these are some of the things in the clinical side, right. And then you have the administrative side. And the administrative side, it’s a necessity because sometimes in an office or a clinic—either a big hospital or a small little private clinic—you still need to know how to process payments. And you learn that. You learn patient charting, how to answer the phones, patient referrals, payroll, medical terminology, first aid, and even CPR.

So, you get the administrative side too within a nine-month program. And the program is based upon the things you will need to start your career. You don’t have courses or classes that you take that you don’t necessarily need for your career that you’re looking for in the medical assistant field. And you have a lot of career opportunities. You can be a medical—you can work in the opportunities of medical offices, urgent care facilities, and—like I stated before—small, big hospitals and specialty offices. So, you have this plethora of opportunities to work for. You get this great wide-based system of knowledge regarding what to do in health care.

And it really, really, in my viewpoint, gets you geared up in the best possible way for that first step into the health care industry and field. But I would definitely suggest when someone’s talking about, “Do you want to go into the medical field?” and there are sites and locations in the hospitals that could hire you and train you, but what you’re going to get is only a sliver of what that hospital or clinic will need if you start working there and then they train you on-site. When you go to a certification program, what you do is you get so much more of a wide-based knowledge that it not only opens up your understanding of the health care industry, but it gives you an opportunity to work in so many different places and locations. And you will have to keep getting retrained for every new career path you take.

Lee: Yeah, right. That’s interesting. And I like the way you kind of broke it down by clinical and administrative, which is, I think, the part of the equation most people don’t think of when they think medical assistant. You think the person who is walking you back to the doctor’s office and takes your temperature, your blood pressure, maybe draws your blood. But you don’t think about all the administrative part of the office work that you’re going to need to know if you’re going to be on the job.

Shibu: And I’ll tell you—one thing we talked about, and I’m going to go back to when you said career opportunities and what the BLS has stated about opportunities. So, before this podcast, I had to go to a doctor’s appointment. [laughter] And I kid you not—and it was just a normal checkup thing—and I was sitting there, and the medical assistant came in. And I asked the person, I said, “Where did you get your training for medical assisting?” And she said Ross. [laughter] And I have to tell you that the apprehension I usually have going in the doctor’s office, but I felt a lot better because I know what’s happening in the classrooms. I know exactly what’s happening in our instructional quality and what our graduates do. And you can’t get any better testimonial than that, when the person that’s treating you actually graduated from the school that you work for.

Lee: That’s great. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s good. Okay. Now let’s say I’m a student, and I’m interested in a medical assistant program, when I tour a campus that offers this program, what are a few things that I should be looking for? Because it seems like a program like this is going to require really up-to-date equipment in order to stay relevant in the current work environments. Would the equipment that the school uses be something I should consider? And what else should I consider? Accreditation, the length of the program, and—perhaps most important—the relationship with employers. What are some things as I’m thinking and I’m touring different campuses to make my decision on where I want to go to school? What’s like a checklist, if you will, of some things I should look for?

Shibu: Sure. I mean, one of the most important things is the career service aspect. Where are the graduates, from this school that you’re looking at—where are they being placed? Where are they going to work? Because at the end of the day, you’re only as good as graduates that you produce. You can state what you want to state, but your graduates are your litmus tests on what kind of quality education you provide, and that is something we’re very proud of. Our graduates are placed across so many different areas. Like I mentioned from the administrative and clinical side, over so many different hospital sites across all the areas that we have a school. Now. So, you want to look at career services. Next, you want to make sure that—do they know you by name? This is very important. The people that, you walk into any school, do they know you by name? Do they really care that you know that this is something that could be very apprehensive for you? You might be switching careers. You might have hit a dead end on a career that you currently are at, and you might want to be jumping career completely. Or maybe this is something you’ve always wanted to do your entire life. And you never had the—what I call the initiative to do it, and something finally got you moving in that direction. Do you feel comfortable with them? Do they treat you like you are somebody special? Because I think that’s what makes Ross very special. We like to make sure every single student is known by name. They’re treated very special. I, even in my position as an executive vice president, I remember last year during the pandemic, I called a list of a couple of hundred students because we were moving from not only ground programs to a hybrid program. And I wanted to make sure that they were ready for the online portion of the class.

Lee: That’s great.

Shibu: So, this is important, and I still get texts from them now and then saying, “Hey, we graduated. We’re excited.” And that’s what makes—so you have to feel the comfort level do you feel special? And of course, look at the classroom environment. Do they have the equipment that you’re going to see in hospitals and clinics? Are the books up to date? And you can research that. We use ICD-10 [International Classification of Diseases]. And that’s a book for all communicable diseases. And it gives you the definitions of what you’re supposed to learn when you’re in a hospital. A lot of systems might use something less than that. So, you want to make sure that everything is—for as far as I think that this is what you’re going to encounter when you move into that job, into that career. And that’s important. And then also are they going to work with you? Do they have a good financial aid department? Financial aid is available for those who qualify. And it’s very important that you, as a student, know all your options. You know what? What is it that you need from a financial aid standpoint to make college affordable to you? And these are all important factors, but I really feel like the most important thing is your comfort level because it doesn’t matter how well their end results are. If you’re a student that that doesn’t feel like they’re supported and they can get through this program to be successful, it’s not worth the investment. And to me, getting the motivation of a group of cheerleaders behind you, talking to you daily, making sure that your classroom environment is where needs to be, and feeling good every single day going home about what you’ve accomplished. It’s important. It is a nine-month program. It is intense, because you’re thinking—you’re going at least Monday through Friday for about 30 weeks, or Monday through Thursday for 36 weeks. It depends. And you’re looking at these programs and you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, I’m committing six–seven, five–six hours, a day of my life for this program.” So to me, do you fit, right? Do you fit in? And that’s a whole—that’s the whole campus environment to make that work.

Lee: Yeah. I think that’s a fantastic answer. And you’re 100% right. It’s a big investment for someone to decide that they want to change their life and, like you said, the amount of time that they’re going to be spending in the program. You want to make sure that you’re investing into a group that’s also investing into you. And I think you hit the nail on the head with all of everything you just said. Now, Mr. Thomas, we work with a number of high school counselors who speak with students interested in medical assistant programs. What would you say are three or four personality traits that make a great medical assistant? We kind of touched on it earlier about being selfless. But I’ll let you answer this. But that might help identify people who would make a great fit for this career choice.

Shibu: I’ll tell you one, you definitely want people—somebody who likes to work with people, someone who likes to be—to make people feel good in the situation they’re in especially—everybody—and I will be the first to admit this: I’m scared to death of doctors and hospitals. [laughter] I have a large number of medical professionals in my family. But I’m still scared of doctors and hospitals. But you got to be able to have that—to help people understand that. I think you also have to have a level of thick skin of dedication. Thick skin means that you’re going to have to sacrifice some time. You’re gonna have to sacrifice and have an investment in this program. So, you want someone that cares about people. You want someone that has an idea of sacrifice and realizing that this is going to take a little bit of dedication. Some grit is what is the best term for it. You have to have somebody with grit. You also have to have somebody that really understands that the things that they put in now are going to pay off later, somebody with a little bit of vision. And then I think the last thing I would look for in a student is someone who just wants a chance, someone who just wants a chance. Most of our biggest success stories are the students that never got a chance anywhere else. But they got it at Ross. And it changes their life for the better.

Lee: Love that.

Shibu: And so, to me, do you—do you want a chance? Do you want a chance to make your career and your family life better? Do you want a chance to not only do something that’s going to help you and your family but also be able to give back to society and your civic duties? And then also people that would desperately need your touch, your warmth, your comfort that you bring. Like I said, I was at a doctor’s appointment. And I was nervous. And this Ross medical assistant came in. I didn’t even know she was from Ross and made me feel better. They made me laugh. They made me feel comfortable. And I think that is what we’re looking for. But if you need a chance, then Ross is here.

Lee: Yeah. I love that. I love everything you just said, empathetic, somebody who’s willing to make sacrifice, a little dedication and vision then—and wants to take a chance who needs somebody to take a chance on them, great fit for you.

Well, this has been another great episode of Imagine America Radio, our first episode of our medical assistant career month. We had a great conversation with Shibu Thomas on the future of medical assistant careers, what to look for in a medical assistant program, and the characteristics of a great medical assistant. We’d like to thank Shibu for joining us today. Shibu, thank you for your time.

Shibu: Well, thank you so much, Lee. It was a great pleasure talking to you. And continue the great work that you’re doing with all these students nationwide. And I wish you guys the best.

Lee: Awesome. If you would like to learn more about Ross Education and their medical assistant programs, please visit the show notes on our website which is www.imagine-america.org/podcast or visit Ross’s website directly at rosseducation.com. Thank you all for joining us. And have a great rest of your day.