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Healthcare

Digital skills courses for medical secretaries: reception, phone and records

In brief

The medical front office is the practice's point of entry: calls, letters, laboratory results and attachments all arrive there before they reach the practitioner. It is also an open counter, with a screen visible from the waiting room. Skillrung courses for medical secretaries start from that very desk: what is said on the phone, what gets opened, what is kept and what is deleted.

Updated on Reviewed by Skillrung teamReview by a subject-matter expert under way

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What we recommend to medical secretaries

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You open the practice's attachments before anyone else

The front office's generic mailbox receives everything: laboratory reports, letters from colleagues, supplier invoices, unsolicited job applications, reminders from health insurers. Nobody in the practice opens as many files from outside, and nobody has as many legitimate reasons to do so. That is what makes it the entry point attacks use most. The course does not ask you to stop opening attachments, which would be absurd, but gives a check that takes a few seconds: is the sender who they claim to be, does the message match an ongoing exchange, does the attachment have the expected format.

Reception is a public place: the screen, the counter, the voice

A practice protects its data with passwords, then installs the front office screen facing the waiting room. The next patient's reason for consulting, their name and their phone number can be read there by the ten people waiting. The same thing happens with the voice. The courses treat this counter-side confidentiality as a skill in its own right, because it is the most visible to patients and the easiest to fix: screen orientation, privacy filter, locking the session when leaving the desk, neutral wording on the phone, documents collected from the shared printer straight away.

On the phone, nobody proves their identity by their voice

Every week the front office receives perfectly plausible requests: a colleague who wants a report right away, a health insurer asking for a document, a worried relative, a technician announcing work and asking for access. None of these people can be identified by their voice, and the urgency on display is the lever used when the request is fraudulent. The advanced phishing course applies a single rule: nothing is passed on through the incoming channel; you call back on a number the practice already knows. A relative's request is handled separately.

Online diary, third-party payment, archiving: the administrative chain

The front office produces and keeps: exported appointment lists, third-party payment spreadsheets, template letters, scans of insurance cards, records archived for years on a computer or a USB stick. Each of these files is a copy of health data living outside the specialist software, with no access rights and no retention period. The GDPR courses address them as they actually exist: where they are, how long to keep them, how to delete them for real. They also cover the most frequent mistake, the group email in visible copy, which exposes an entire patient list in one click.

Sources

What the official text says

Every figure or legal statement on this page points to its primary source, with its date. We publish no figure without a verifiable source.

  • In France, the secrecy covering information about a person receiving care binds every professional working within the health system (Article L1110-4 of the Public Health Code).

    Source : Code de la santé publique, article L1110-4 : Légifrance, 1 janvier 2024.

  • Personal data is kept in a form that allows individuals to be identified for no longer than is necessary for the purposes (Article 5(1)(e) of the GDPR).

    Source : Règlement (UE) 2016/679 (RGPD), article 5 : Journal officiel de l'Union européenne, 27 avril 2016.

Frequently asked questions

What medical secretaries ask us

Can a patient obtain their record over the phone?

They have the right to access their data, but not without their identity being established. The request is handled through a channel that allows that check, and the reply goes to an address the practice already knows. Answering a voice on the phone on the spot means risking sending a health record to somebody else.

The reception screen can be seen from the waiting room: is that serious?

It is a continuous leak, visible to everyone, and one of the simplest to fix. Turn the screen around, add a privacy filter, shorten the time before the screen locks, and lock the session every time you leave the counter. These four actions remove almost all of the problem without changing anything in your organisation.

How do I recognise a fake laboratory report?

By its context more than its appearance: were you expecting this document, for this patient, from this laboratory? Then check the sender's full address and the file format. If in doubt, do not open it and call the laboratory on its usual number. The phishing course trains this sorting on reconstructed messages.

How long should patient documents be kept?

A retention period is not improvised: it is tied to the purpose of the document and recorded once and for all. The GDPR course explains how to set these periods, write them in the practice's register, and above all how to delete what has expired, including exports and copies stored outside the specialist software.

Can I have the practice's letters written by an AI?

For a letter template with no identifying data, yes, and the time saved is real. For a letter containing a name, a date of birth or a clinical detail, no: that information has no place in a freely accessible service. The generative AI course shows how to separate the template from the content and how to proofread what is produced.

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The first four slides of every course are free, with no account and no bank card. From the fifth onwards, a subscription is required.

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