Medical Assisting Program
The following information is an overview of information relevant to the Medical Assisting Program found in the Hartfield Library at Henderson Community College. This information is not intended to be a complete list of such material, but rather is a sampling of some titles that will be helpful and easily found in the Hartfield Library.
“(Medical Assistants) perform administrative and certain clinical duties under the direction of physician. Administrative duties may include scheduling appointments, maintaining medical records, billing, and coding for insurance purposes. Clinical duties may include taking and recording vital signs and medical histories, preparing patients for examination, drawing blood, and administering medicals as directed by physician.” (O*NET Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 3rd edition, page 301.)
To find information useful for classes in this program, you may look in several places. Our library's online catalog is called Voyager. Using Voyager, you can do a basic search by typing in key words, such as "medical terminology" or “dosage calculations.” Voyager will show you all the books and audiovisual materials available on the selected topic. You will find that many Library of Congress call numbers on these subjects begin with the letter “Q” or “R" (e.g. for books on medical terminology, look at books with the call number R 123). If you wanted to browse the shelves in the reference collection or in the circulating collection located on the second floor, both the “Q” and the "R" sections would be a good places to look. You may also look in the online databases of periodical articles, the hard copy periodicals, the audiovisual collection, or Internet Web sites. Each of these sources of information is explained below.
Medical Assistants are heavily involved in the many and diverse operations of medical facilities. Thus, when Medical Assisting students search, many information sources termed “Nursing and Allied Health” will be of significant value.
If you have questions or need assistance in finding additional materials, please see a librarian at the reference desk or contact the reference desk at 270-831-9767. Email assistance is available at kevin.reid@kctcs.edu.
FINDING BOOKS
To find books in either the reference or circulating collections, use Voyager. When searching Voyager, please remember to limit your searches to Henderson Community College; otherwise the search will find books held in any of the KCTCS libraries. More thorough instructions on the use of Voyager are available in the tri-fold brochure titled “Using Voyager.” This brochure is available at the front of the library.
Subject Headings are key words or phrases used in Voyager to tell you what a book is about. The most efficient and productive searches are those that use Subject Headings. Some of the Subject Headings that are particularly useful for students in the Medical Assisting Program are:
Allied Health Personnel
Insurance, Health
Medical Assistants
Medical History Taking
Medical Offices
Medical Records
Medical Secretaries
Medical Transcription
Pharmacology
Reference Books
Reference materials are materials that are created to give you general information about a topic. After you read the information in a reference book, you can search the library for more detailed and extensive information. Hopefully, you will find some good ideas about useful subject headings or key words that are relevant to your topic by looking through the reference books. When you are ready to search for more information about your topic, you can use the library's online catalog, Voyager. Below is a list of titles of some reference books that you might find helpful. Because these are reference books, they cannot be checked out; instead they are to be used in the library.
1. Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, REF R 121 .D73
2. Nursing Diagnosis Reference Manual (5th edition), REF RT 48.6 .S66 2001
3. Medical Abbreviations & Eponyms (2nd edition), REF R 123 .S569 1997
4. Physicians’ Desk Reference: PDR, REF RS 75 .P5 2005
Books That Can Be Checked Out (Circulating Books)
Circulating books are books that can be checked out of the library. The circulating collection is located on the second floor of the library. Anyone with a valid library card may check out these books. Below are some titles that may be of interest to students in the Medical Assisting Program.
1. Building A Medical Vocabulary: With Spanish Translations, R 123 .L46 2001
2. Introduction to Health Occupations, R 697 .A4 B33 2004
3. Henke’s Med Math, RS 57 .H46 2003
4.Administrative Medical Assisting, R 728.8 .F64 2000
5. Medical Insurance Billing and Coding, R 728.5 .F67 2003
6. Medical Office Administration, R 728.8 .P665 2003
Electronic Books
Many of the library's newest books for the Medical Assisting program are available electronically through the Voyager online catalog. To access these books, simply enter a search in Voyager, and scan the resulting titles. If an e-book is available, the phrase, "[electronic resource]" will appear after the title. Click on the title to read any of the electronic books. You can check the books out for up to four hours. Additional instructions for accessing electronic books are available at the reference desk. Some Medical Assisting titles include:
FINDING PERIODICAL ARTICLES
Students generally find articles taken from magazines and journals to be particularly useful sources of current information. To help students, the Hartfield Library subscribes to a wide variety of periodicals in both hard copy and electronic formats. The articles available electronically are found on a number of databases accessible through the library's web page. For instructions on how to access articles from the specific databases, use the tri-fold brochures available in the front of the library (e.g. "How to Use InfoTrac.")
Printed Periodicals
The following periodical titles are available in the hardcopy format on the library's first floor and are of value to the students of the Medical Assisting Program.
1. American Journal of Nursing
2. Caring
3. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
3. Mayo Clinic Health Letter
4. Medical Laboratory Observer
5. Nursing
Online Databases
Each of these databases contains hundreds of full-text articles as they were published in various national magazines and journals. To see which periodicals are available full-text in each database, select that database, go to the message "Title List" and click on it to review the list (in the ProQuest databases, click on “Publication Search”). If you want to read an article from a specific periodical after searching a database, be sure to specify that title during your search.
Please note that each database offers help screens that explain how the search engine of that database operates. These help screens also identify the advanced search options for students who want to fine-tune their searches.
EBSCO Databases
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition
CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Allied & Health Literature)
Pre-CINAHL
MEDLINE
Clinical Pharmacology
Health Source - Consumer Edition
Professional Development Collection
Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection
AcademicSearch Premier
MasterFile Premier
InfoTrac
Health Reference Center Academic
Health and Wellness Resource Center
Expanded Academic ASAP
ProQuest
ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health
Career and Technical Education
First Search
MEDLINE
ECO
WorldCat
Audio-Visual Materials
Audio-visual materials can come in many forms. Videos, DVD's, CD's, filmstrips, and slides are all audio-visual materials. At the Hartfield Library, many of our audio-visual materials are DVDs and videos. The audio-visual materials are located on the first floor, in room LB 102. The titles below may be of interest to students in the Medical Assisting Program.
- EMTs, Nurses, Therapists, and Assistants, AV (DVD) RT 82 .E97
- Health Information Management, AV (DVD) RA 976.5 .H43
- Medical Technicians and Technologists, AV (DVD) RB 37.6 .E96
- What should I do? The basics of First Aid, AV (DVD) RC 86.7 .W52
- Understanding Medication Guidelines, AV RT 73 .L4
- Performing Head-To-Toe Assessment, AV RT 48 .P47
Internet Web Sites
Internet sites are becoming increasingly useful. Many sites—especially those associated with professional organizations offer connections to information such as articles, bibliographies, and job search engines. A few such useful web sites are listed below. Please be aware that electronic addresses do change frequently. If an address listed below becomes obsolete, use an Internet search engine like Yahoo or Google to find the new address for the organization.
1. http://www.aama-ntl.org/
The American Association of Medical Assistants
This site offers a search the site feature. It also provides information concerning certification.
2. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/laboratorytests.html
MEDLINEplus, a service of the National Library of Medicine
This site provides a search feature. It also contains information on the following: understanding your tests, diagnosis/symptoms, prevention/screening, research, specific conditions/aspects, and children. This site also provides the names of dozens of tests and conditions/diseases. It provides a screenings by age section.
3. http://www.ama-assn.org
The American Medical Association (AMA).
This site offers a search the site feature. The mission of the AMA is to help doctors help patients and provides information on such topics as medical advocacy, a wide variety of professional resources, and news in the medical field.
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