Thursday, July 10, 2014

Post III: Overcoming Obstacles

My experience at Heritage Professional Associates has been a great experience as I learn something new everyday. At the beginning of the internship, the office was extremely busy with heavy workloads of psychological tests to be scored and many new patient intakes. One obstacle I had was having too much work. As an intake coordinator I speak with new clients on the phone and complete intakes. After going through the intake process, I have to call the insurance companies to obtain insurance benefits for the new patients. I will be on hold for up to thirty minutes with the insurance companies which takes a lot of time out of my shift. Along with gathering insurance information and personal information for the new clients I have to score psychological tests for patients. The tests can take up to twenty minutes to score. Both the intake tasks and scoring tasks have deadlines so it was very stressful trying to complete everything in so little time. To overcome the stress and obstacle of completing my tasks I decided to score the tests while I was on hold with the insurance companies. I also always try to complete the intake process before I finish scoring tests because the intakes need to be assigned to a therapist within 24 hours. I  have figured out that by calling the insurance companies with many different patient intakes I can save time. I obtain the insurance information of many different clients at once rather than calling for each patient insurance information individually.

 
One type of psychological tests that I score

Lately, the workload has slowed down and the past two weeks I have had very few tasks to complete. This is an obstacle that in my opinion is worse than having too much work. With a light workload the time goes by much slower. When there is not much for me to do I always offer my help to the secretaries and therapists in the office. If they don't need my help then I will research possible future career paths on the computer. I also will read books on psychology that the therapists in the office will recommend to me.

I have learned that along with time management, communication between everyone in the office is essential for success in the office. With heavy workloads and light workloads, I always communicate with the two other interns about what is going on and what happened during my shift so that we can all be aware of new patients and their assigned therapists.



1 comment:

  1. I had the same experience of having too much to do all at once, and it also worked for me to multi-task when possible and prioritize the tasks in terms of importance. It's great that you are making use of your more recent down-time to just learn more about the field. In addition to researching career paths online, I've found it's also helpful to get a personal perspective by asking other employees about their own paths and experiences.

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