Are your family commitments preventing you from having a career? Is the commute to and from office coming in the way of you spending quality time with your family? Is retired life leaving you totally uninspired?
If your answer to any of the above questions is yes, then it’s time for you to start thinking about the possibility of working from home.
The work from home industry has expanded in the last few years thanks to technological innovations that allow workers to do their job and do it well from their homes. Availability of solutions like web conferencing, instant messaging, VPNs and sophisticated email clients have made it possible for virtually any job to be done from home.
The advancement in mobile technology over the last few years has further added to the ease with which professionals are able to work from their home offices.
Popular Work from Home Jobs
Even though almost all jobs – from something as straightforward as data entry to complex management related tasks – can be done from home, there are some professions that are more home-office friendly than others.
And if you are starting over, it’s probably best to try your hands at these occupations. The good news is that these home-based careers can be secured with the skillset provided by short vocational training courses. Let’s take a deep dive into some such career courses:
Medical Transcription
Medical transcription is one of the most popular home-based jobs. The core job of a medical transcriptionist (MT) is to transcribe taped doctor dictations into text format, although they are also responsible for checking and correcting factual inaccuracies and grammatical errors, formatting the texts in standard styles, and other such tasks.
Consequently, a typical medical transcriptionist training program covers courses in typing skills, medical terminology, anatomy, grammar and punctuation, etc.
Most medical transcriptionist training courses at vocational schools can be completed within a year’s time, while some self-paced online programs can be covered in as little as three months.
Virtual Administrative Assistance
A virtual administrative assistant performs the same job that an onsite admin assistant or secretary does, but only, well, virtually! In addition to administrative services, virtual assistants may also provide creative, financial or technical assistance to their employers depending on their qualification and experience.
Virtual administrative assistants work in a variety of industries, including healthcare, and use different channels of communication such as telephone, e-mail, fax machines etc. to perform their job from home.
An
administrative assistant course must train graduates in typical office procedures, written and oral communication, MS Office applications, etc. Those who opt for medical administrative assistant training are also taught courses in basic anatomy, medical terminology, procedures specific to healthcare offices, etc.
Medical Coding & Billing
Medical coding and billing specialists are part of the all-important healthcare informatics team in-charge of maintaining patient records. They are responsible for assigning industry-standard codes to clinical procedures performed by physicians and other healthcare practitioners and use these documents for billing patients or their health insurance providers.
If these professionals don’t perform their job correctly, hospitals will not get reimbursed for the services they provide and the delivery of healthcare may get seriously hampered. In that sense, theirs is a key function within a healthcare environment.
A medical billing and coding program usually incorporates courses in medical terminology, anatomy, healthcare reimbursement, medical record formats, etc.
Vocational training programs in medical billing and coding also include a practicum wherein students get a chance to work on real patient records.