Medical Assistant Prospective Students

Do I Qualify?

To complete the Medical Assistant Program within two years, entering students should have successfully completed:

• Regents Biology, College Preparatory Biology or Applied Biology

Students who lack the background described are still encouraged to apply. Based on an evaluation of background, individuals may be accepted to SUNY Broome and advised through a preparatory program. Each entering student is tested prior to scheduling.

Personal characteristics that predict success in this program are good communication skills, have a caring manner, and have a desire to be involved in a truly rewarding profession.

Is This the Right Career for You?

1. Would you like a health career with opportunities for significantly varied responsibilities?

Medical Assistant are trained to perform tasks in three major areas of the medical office: administrative tasks, including medical transcription, insurance billing and coding, and medical record maintenance, patient care tasks, including taking patient histories and vital signs, and assisting with the performance of diagnostic procedures and treatments, and basic laboratory testing, including the collection and performance of waived laboratory tests.

2. Would you like a health career that typically does not require weekend, night, or holiday work?

Medical Assistants often choose to work in physician offices without weekend, shift, or holiday work. Of course, positions with more varied hours may also be available at clinics or hospitals.

3. Are you interested in a curriculum with limited mathematics and no chemistry or physics requirements?

The Medical Assistant Curriculum requires only the successful completion of MAT 090. Check with your advisor to find out if our high school courses or placement test exempt you from this requirement. There is no chemistry or physics requirement.

4. Would you like to work in a doctor’s office or clinic as part of a health care team?

Doctor’s offices or outpatient clinics are the type of practice chosen most often by Medical Assistant graduates.

5. Would you find caring directly for patients fulfilling?

Medical Assistants take medical histories and vital signs, explain treatment procedures to patients, prepare patients for examination, and assist the healthcare provider during the examination procedure.

If you have answered yes to several of these questions, this career may be right for you.

Student Essential Functions

The Essential Functions are the nonacademic requirements of each Program. They correspond to the physical, psychological, and professional demands required of a Medical Assistant. These professionals perform procedures that impact patient care and safety. For this reason, although Broome Community College is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution, it is important that every applicant meets certain technical standards (essential functions) to be able to engage in training activities that will not endanger students, faculty or patients.

The minimum goal or expectation of the program is to prepare competent entry-level medical assistants in the cognitive (knowledge), psychomotor (skills), and affective (behavior) learning domains.

With appropriate accommodations if needed, all students must be able to perform activities such as those listed below.

Medical Assistant Essential Functions

Physical Functions:

1. Ability to efficiently implement the skills required in performing medical assistant functions using sufficient gross and fine motor coordination.
2. Ability to perform delicate manipulations that require good eye-hand coordination such as performing phlebotomy; operating computers; and being able to adequately focus and manipulate a microscope; use the small muscle dexterity necessary to do such tasks as gloving, gowning, and operating controls on machinery. Ability to write legibly and correctly.
3. Ability to read typewritten text and patient data from a computer screen, with or without corrective devices.
4. Ability to discriminate color in order to identify reagents and other materials such as laboratory media, stained preparations, and the physical properties of various body fluids.
5. Ability to navigate efficiently within the classroom, medical offices, hospital and laboratory corridors, passageways, and doorway at a pace consistent with that of other employees.
6. Ability to speak, to hear, and to observe patients in order to elicit information, perceive nonverbal communication, describe changes in mood, activity and posture. Ability to hear with or without corrective devices to be able to transcribe medical dictation from recorded media.
7. Ability to respond to distress sounds, visual distress cues, emergency alarms, and vital sign assessment equipment.

Psychological Functions:

1. Ability to perform accurately and quickly even under stressful conditions and adapt to changing situations.
2. Ability to exercise independent judgment and think logically in the performance of one’s duties.
3. Ability to organize and assume responsibility for one’s work.
4. Ability to identify behaviors that would endanger a person’s safety and intervene quickly in a crisis situation with an appropriate solution.
5. Ability to react quickly, both mentally and physically.
6. Ability to remain calm, rational, decisive, and in control at all times, especially during emergency situations.

Professional Functions:

1. Ability to communicate in the English language in a professional, positive, tactful manner with patients and their family members, physicians, nurses, other health care and nonhealth care employees.
2. Ability to maintain patient confidentiality and exercise ethical judgment, integrity, honesty, dependability, and accountability in the performance of one’s professional responsibilities.
3. Ability to work carefully while maintaining efficiency and organization.
4. Ability to exercise critical thinking skills to solve problems.
5. Ability to follow written or verbal directions to perform tasks or procedures.
6. Ability to project a well-groomed, neat appearance and maintain cleanliness and personal grooming consistent with close personal contact.
7. Ability to work as a member of a team.
8. Exhibit social skills appropriate to professional interactions.