Review: 5 Best Medical Assisting Textbooks for High School

Are you new to teaching health science classes? Or did your program just add a new course for medical assisting?

If so, you’re going to need curriculum materials to help cover your standards and prepare your students for their medical assistant careers.

While we provide a digital health science curriculum that many instructors use for medical assisting courses, our solution isn’t right for everyone.

Some teachers prefer using traditional textbooks for their courses - and there’s nothing wrong with that!

There are dozens of medical assistant textbooks out there, but how do you know which one is right for your program?

In this article, we’ll share the five most common medical assistant books we hear about from teachers like you.

The top medical assisting textbooks (in no particular order) are:

1. Medical Assisting: Administrative and Clinical Procedures
2. Clinical Procedures for Medical Assistants
3. Comprehensive Medical Assisting
4. Today’s Medical Assistant: Clinical and Administrative Procedures
5. Kinn’s Medical Assisting Fundamentals
   

In this article, you’ll read an overview of each medical assisting book to help you decide if one is right for you and your students.

1. Medical Assisting: Administrative and Clinical Procedures

• Authors: Kathryn Booth, Leesa Whicker, and Terri Wyman
• Copyright: 2021
• Retail Price: $180 hardcover, $130 loose-leaf

The textbook has 58 chapters about medical assisting skills, which are organized into nine units:

1. Medical Assisting as a Career
2. Safety and the Environment
3. Communication
4. Administrative Practices
5. Applied Anatomy and Physiology
6. Infection Control and Clinical Practices
7. Assisting with Diagnostics
8. Assisting in Therapeutics
9. Medical Assisting Practice
   

Overall, each chapter highlights a variety of concepts and skills ranging from administrative tasks to hands-on clinical procedures.

If you’re focused on only teaching clinical medical assisting procedures, you’ll likely find yourself skipping chapters related to administrative tasks.

On the flip side, if you’re preparing students to become medical administrative assistants, this text has a lot of unrelated information on procedures..

If you teach a course that covers both administrative and clinical medical assisting, this book will provide the best of both worlds!

2. Clinical Procedures for Medical Assistants

• Author: Kathy Bonewit-West
• Copyright: 2018
• Retail Price: $126
  

The Clinical Procedures for Medical Assistants textbook contains 23 chapters related to common procedures that medical assistants complete in their daily work.

Overall the textbook discusses more than 120 procedures, including:

• Measuring vital signs
• Phlebotomy procedures
• Minor office surgery
• Physical exams
• Eye and ear assessments
• Urinalysis
• Prenatal care
  

These procedures are presented in a step-by-step format, with illustrations and diagrams showing how to properly perform them.

Any teacher who needs a book with detailed clinical medical assisting procedures could find this text useful.

However, it's important to note that this medical assisting book was published in 2017. You may need to review the procedures and make adjustments to align with more current processes.

3. Comprehensive Medical Assisting

• Authors: Nina Beaman, Kristiana D. Routh, Lorraine M. Papazian-Boyce, Ron Maly, and Jaime Nguyen
• Copyright: 2018
• Retail Price: $140
  

Comprehensive Medical Assisting is designed to help teach both hands-on procedures and soft skills in medical assisting classes.

The text is made up of 59 chapters across five units:

1. Introduction to Health Care
2. Administrative Medical Assisting
3. Anatomy and Physiology
4. Clinical Medical Assisting
5. Career Assistance
   

In total, you’ll find 237 step-by-step administrative and clinical procedures, which is more than any other book on our list!

If your goal is to teach as many medical assisting procedures as possible, Comprehensive Medical Assisting could be the perfect fit!

However, the lack of clear pricing is unusual. If you want to get detailed pricing information on this textbook, you’ll have to contact the publisher directly.

This could be an issue because first-year health science instructors aren’t always clear on the funding that they have available.

So if you find yourself in that boat, you may have to dive into your different funding opportunities before you get a quote about this textbook’s cost.

4. Today’s Medical Assistant

• Authors: Kathy Bonewit-West, Sue Hunt, and Edith Applegate
• Copyright: 2020
• Retail Price: $139
  

Today’s Medical Assistant includes both clinical and administrative procedures that medical assistants will need to know on the job.

In addition, it majorly focuses on anatomy and physiology to ensure medical assisting students know everything about the body systems prior to jumping into clinical work.

Overall, you’ll find 51 chapters across four distinct sections:

1. Introduction to Medical Assisting
2. Anatomy and Physiology
3. Clinical Component
4. Administrative Component
   

The layout of each section and chapter presents information in a consistent way, so your students always know what to expect when starting a new topic.

This includes items such as:

• Chapter outlines
• Learning objectives
• Key terms
• Highlight boxes
• And more
  

Overall, any medical assisting instructor would find this text useful. However, there are still other, more recent medical assistant textbooks that you can consider for your classroom.

5. Kinn’s Medical Assisting Fundamentals

• Authors: Brigitte Niedzwiecki
• Copyright: 2022
• Retail Price: $135
  

Kinn’s Medical Assisting Fundamentals introduces medical assisting concepts in a context heavily centered around anatomy and physiology.

In total, you’ll find 57 chapters, which are organized into eight units:

1. Medical Terminology, Anatomy and Physiology
2. Professional Medical Assistant
3. Administrative Ambulatory Care
4. Basic Clinical Procedures
5. Advanced Clinical Procedures
6. Limited Scope Radiology
7. Medical Laboratory
8. Employment Seeking
   

Each chapter in this medical assisting book is centered around a scenario to help students understand each concept and skill in a real-world context.

What’s great about Kinn’s Medical Assisting Fundamentals is the publisher took time to note which medical assisting certifications it is aligned to, such as NHA CCMA, NHA CMAA, and AMCA CMAC! The new edition of the textbook includes an additional unit on limited scope radiology and expanded content in other chapters.

So if your medical assisting students want to become certified, this textbook could be a great addition to your curriculum.

Which Medical Assisting Textbook Is Right for You?

Though it’s not possible to review all of the medical assistant books out there, this article can give you some initial direction!

As you learn more about each resource, keep in mind that many teachers use more than just a traditional medical assisting textbook to teach their courses.

In fact, some medical assisting instructors have found that a digital curriculum works better for their classroom than traditional textbooks.

Want to learn about other medical assistant curriculum options? Consider checking out HealthCenter21!

It’s used by thousands of health science teachers like you to meet standards and prepare students for certifications all while saving time with planning and grading.

With more than 1000 hours of curriculum content, teachers like you use HealthCenter21 to teach courses for medical assisting, nurse assisting, patient care technician, and more.

Wondering if HealthCenter21 could be right for your medical assisting program? Click below to discover all of the topics you can teach using the curriculum.