CMAs Climb the Career Ladder
Certified medical assistants with Johns Hopkins Community Physicians hone their skills and advance.

Amanda Coleman with a patient at Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, Wyman Park. Joan Kramer, center, guides CMAs as they practice placing leads on a model.

Amanda Coleman seems to be everywhere at once. In one treatment room, she's coaxing an asthmatic baby to take a dropper-full of medicine. Moments later, in another, she's wrestling down a rambunctious 4-year-old, in for a routine follow-up.

Coleman is a certified medical assistant. At Wyman Park, as at Johns Hopkins Community Physicians' 16 other sites throughout the state of Maryland, CMAs are vital members of the medical team. They prep patients for visits, give shots, prepare medicines, run tests and control checks on tests, and perform countless other key clinical tasks that help keep physicians' practices humming along.

Bright and energetic, Coleman, 27, is eager to get ahead. Now she can, thanks to a series of classes JHCP is offering to all its approximately 120 medical assistants. In the program, known as CMA Career Ladder, medical assistants move through three levels of training, beginning with a mandatory, five-hour workshop that hones basic skills and ending with courses that focus on advanced techniques, leadership and supervision. CMA Career Ladder is one example of more than half a dozen programs now under way throughout The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System that help employees advance into more satisfying jobs with higher pay.

On this particular morning, four medical assistants are taking part in a level I workshop. They run control checks on a urine pregnancy test and a finger-stick, blood-glucose test for diabetics. They give each other saline injections to simulate PPDs (tuberculosis skin tests), practice placing EKG leads on a model, and demonstrate how to breathe into a peak flow meter, a device used to evaluate asthmatics.

"These workshops have been very positive. Even those with years and years of experience say they learned something," says Joan Kramer, JHCP staff development manager and program leader. She is also an advisory board member of Medix, the Baltimore school that produces most of JHCP's medical assistants, so she is particularly qualified to oversee the Career Ladder curriculum.

If the four medical assistants in today's level I workshop choose to move on to levels II and III, they will have to make application and obtain permission from their manager and physician. They will embark on a rigorous course of study, much of it on their own time, that will include classroom sessions and learning via online modules. With each successive level, they will earn higher wages. A CMA who starts at $12 an hour, for example, would earn $15 after completing all three levels.

Several years ago, medical assistants weighed patients, took their blood pressure, then left them to await the doctor's arrival. Things are different today. CMAs now give antibiotics by injection and, to a baby, as many as four or five immunizations. Plus, they must learn to use the new tests that routinely come on the market. The increasing complexity of their work makes a program like CMA Career Ladder practically a necessity.

As the health services industry expands, demand for medical assistants is expected to grow much faster than average through the year 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The medical assistant program will help JHCP round out its workforce. "We want to retain good employees by rewarding them and giving them avenues for improvement," says Kramer. "We also want to recruit good people. Through CMA Career Ladder, we can provide the good salary structure and opportunities to advance that will help make that possible."

-ABS