Known for providing 2-year certificates and 1-year professional diplomas, Gallatin College complements the 4-year degree that an aspirant can continue at Montana State University. Dedicated to ensuring access to workforce development, Gallatin College offers a Certificate of Applied Science (CAS) to medical assistant aspirants in Montana. The degree program is stipulated to last for a year, and students must receive a C for all required courses in order to graduate and procure the certificate. It has a total of 36 program credits, and enrolment is limited, as it attracts a lot of applications from the state of Montana every year.

The program begins in Fall semesters, and the three program courses that have the highest credit score of 4 include Medical Procedures I, Medical Procedures II, and Externship. The externship usually happens at ambulatory settings pre-decided by the college, at the end of the program. They have state-of-the-art classroom and lab facilities. It is one of the programs that are eligible for financial aid, but only in approval with the Department of Education. If you’re a student who has been registered for 6 or more credits in this college, you’re required to procure health insurance, which can be received for $2,300-$2,700, depending upon the semester term.

Helena College offers 30+ certificate and degree course options, which range from arts, humanities, and communication to business, STEM, law, health sciences, and industry and trades. Helena College offers a Certified of Applied Science (CAS) in medical assisting to medical assistant aspirants in the state of Montana that provides high school goers a unique opportunity to continue their education in the health support sector.

CAS degree can be completed while an aspirant is working towards an Associate Degree in Applied Sciences. It requires 29 total credit hours to be completed, and 3 related courses require a minimum of C for you to procure certification at the end of the term. Moreover, maintaining an overall GPA of 2 is essential towards graduation and procuring the degree. Scholarships and financial grants are available in Helena College, and students can also use the special work-study feature, under which they can earn considerably well, alongside their coursework.

Flathead Valley Community College’s (FVCC) program of study offered to medical assistants is a certificate, which has a remarkable 100% job placement rate between 2018 and 2019. For 2017, all students appearing for the American Association of Medical Assistant (AAMA)’s certification license examination had a 100% success rate. Besides remarkable performance, as reflected in the high placement rate, FVCC also boasts of a high level of degree satisfaction from its past students.

To be a certified medical assistant out of FVCC, the CAS program needs you to spend 180 hours exclusively on clinical externship, besides fulfilling the 1-year course, which is divided into 3 semesters. It is often also a test center for National Centre for Competency Testing (NCCT)’s licensing exam, and preparing for the test, it offers individuals a one credit course focused on exam preparation during the summer semester. Their classes begin in summer, as well as fall semesters.

Highlands College of Montana Tech offers an Associate in Applied Sciences (AAS) degree to its medical assistant aspirants. The minimum credits required to complete this 2-year course is 69, and it is divided into 4 consecutive semesters. The first semester is for 16 credits, the second is for 18 credits, the third is for 17 credits, and the fourth is for 18 credits. It is a hybrid course, which has a mixture of online classes and offline mandatory lab work. If someone is unable to complete the course the first time, they might opt for it again. But, they would be debarred from the third attempt to clear their coursework or graduate.

It also mandates that students have to do a clinical externship, and to be eligible for clinical externship placement, the college lays down some pre-requisites, like students must pass a minimum of 10 courses from the core coursework with a minimum grade C, have passed a criminal background check, have a health insurance coverage, have completed and procured certifications for First Aid and Basic Life Support for Healthcare Providers, have taken three doses of Hepatitis B vaccine, and have the required documentation ready for a TDaP immunization.

Besides, for the externship, they are required to buy proper attire and stethoscopes. At present, the AAS degree takes in 10 students for the course, and sometimes a competitive selection process is put together to ascertain the right candidates. Classes begin in the fall semesters, and the placement rate of the 2018 batch was 100%, and that of the 2017 batch was 80%.

This school offers an AAS degree to its medical assistants, and the program was started in the 2015 Fall semester. It is a 2-year degree program that requires students to take the special as well as general education courses, as deemed necessary by the AAS degree curriculum. The pre-requisites that are necessitated before the initiation of the program include a criminal background check, all immunizations to be done, besides having health insurance and providing documentation for the same.

The program requires students to procure a minimum B grade in all MAST, BIOS, and HIEP courses. A total of 91 credit hours must be fulfilled by the end of 2 years, and the program is divided into 6 consecutive semesters. Each year has three semesters: fall, winter, and summer. In the last semester, medical assistant aspirants are required to do a clinical externship, which accounts for 12 out of their 14 credit hours, and the rest is dedicated to certification exam preparation.