Career investigation: Medical support coordinators

Most support coordinators believe they should get paid more.

What does a support coordinator do? Well, Dania Rosas Quiñonez, a surgery coordinator at Keck Medical Center of USC, says they schedule surgeries, collect payment for surgeries, schedule appointments with patient’s primary treating physicians (physician who is primarily responsible for managing the care of an injured worker) for medical clearance, get surgery authorizations from insurance companies, and explain to patients what they can and cannot do before their surgery.

“It can get overwhelming when it’s really, really busy during the summer or during Christmas because we have a high volume of patients and everyone wants everything done really, really fast and some things take a lot of time.”

This shows that they most likely deal with annoyed patients that just want to get it over with or patients that are just rude in general. Although she loves her job, the average pay they get is $27 an hour and they work about eight hours a day, which in total is $216 a day, according to Rosas Quiñonez. She believes she should get paid more because of the other things she has to do besides making appointments, like making people feel comfortable and convincing them to get procedures done, doing a lot of customer service, and collecting most of the money from the department for cosmetic surgeries.

Another support coordinator, Rosalia Tinoco, thinks a little differently. She says she loves her job and that it is very rewarding but she believes that it is decent pay for what they do and it isn’t a hard job. Even though she says it isn’t that hard, she also mentions that it does get stressful because a lot of the cases are combined surgeries and she has to find a date that works for both surgeons and a lot of the times their schedules are busy so it gets stressful to find a date that is pleasing for the patient’s needs and meet their expectations.

Finally, another support coordinator, Iliana Murillo, thinks similar to Rosas Quiñonez. She likes her job but also believes she should get paid more because it is stressful and the economy is bad. She says it’s stressful when clients call daily, they don’t understand what she tries to explain to them, when they want to have surgery the next day when it isn’t possible, and when  they cant find or book time.