Capstone Internship
I had an internship at Indiana Immunization Coalition. They are a mobile vaccine clinic that aims to provide vaccinations to anyone regardless of insurance or financial status. The team helps with increasing public health status and access to care within the community.
Primary Responsibilities
Checking Insurance
When patients come in for vaccinations, I have to check if they have private insurance or medicaid/medicare. I then have to run their insurance to make sure it goes through.
Recommending Vaccines
Once I receive the patients registration paperwork, I look them up in our system and print out their records. I then go and tell the patient the vaccines we recommend and get their consent for those shots.
Entering Patient Information
Once the patient has gotten their vaccines, I have to enter their information into our system in order to update their records and be able to bill the insurance companies.
Learning Objectives
I had three learning objectives going into my internship this fall:
1. Strengthen my communication skills
2. Develop administrative skills
3. Improve my leadership skills
I feel like I did meet all of these goals while in this position. My responsibilities required me to talk to patients constantly, which helped me work on my communication skills. A lot of the tasks I worked on were administrative, which helped me develop those skills. Finally, towards the end of my experience I took on more tasks that involved making decisions and helping delegate tasks, which helped me work on my leadership skills.
Personal Development
During this experience, I definitely further developed my communication skills. While I am good at communicating with people I know, in this internship you have to talk to a lot of people you don't know throughout the day. I was not as comfortable doing that, but after the last couple of months I have worked on improving that.
I have found that my confidence has area for growth. While I am very flexible and will do whatever is asked of me, even if I know how to do it, I will have concerns of if I am doing it correctly.
Some specific contributions I made were checking patients insurance so it's correct for billing, registering patients for future clinics, and contacting organizations for donations to our silent auction.
Academic Connections
Some of the Classes I took that helped me succeed in this internship were Medical Group Management, Health Systems Administration, and Intro to Public Health. I think these specifically helped me succeed because I learned information about insurance, administrative work, and the way medical facilities operate.
In other classes I have taken such as Professionalism, I learned about how to carry myself in a professional environment. I learned things such as how to dress on different occasions (business causal, formal, etc) and how to be prepared for interviews.