Medical office management: need, awareness and educational priorities

 The management of most clinics and other outpatient centers are by clinicians. However, most clinicians do not educate any management courses and are not familiar with this field of science. This study aimed to study and describes training needs and priorities related to medical office management for clinicians. This was a cross-sectional study.  All physicians affiliated to Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR) with experiences of running a medical office in Tehran were invited to took part in the study. The data were collected using a self-designed questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and Friedman test were applied to analyze the data. In all 37 physicians participated in the study. The general needs of medical office management categorized to 27 topics and 7 headlines: financial management, human resources management, medical risk management, non-medical risk management, process management, evaluation and informatics. Respondents were most aware on medical risk management and the least was on informatics. The most important educational needs and priorities for clinicians were 'Medical office informatics', 'human resources management', 'financial management' and 'evaluation'. The study results showed that physicians with experiences of medical office management identified that they need courses on management. Indeed priorties could be indentified with a study bigger sample size and better design.