The CCMA (Certified Clinical Medical Assistant) exam from the NHA has 150 scored questions (plus 30 unscored), a 390-of-500 scaled passing score, and a 3-hour limit. The fee is $165, the 2024 pass rate was about 81%, and one domain — Clinical Patient Care — is 56% of the exam. It's the most widely held medical assistant credential in the US.
The CCMA exam — the Certified Clinical Medical Assistant certification from the National Healthcareer Association (NHA) — certifies that a medical assistant can safely perform the full range of clinical and administrative duties in physician offices, clinics, urgent care, and hospitals. It's the NHA's clinical credential, distinct from the administrative-only CMAA and from the AAMA's CMA. With 233,190 active certifications at the end of 2024, the CCMA is the most widely held medical assistant credential in the country.
It's worth passing because the credential opens doors. 89% of healthcare organizations request or require medical assistant certification, and medical assistant employment is projected to grow far faster than the average occupation, with about 112,300 openings each year through 2034 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). For most candidates the CCMA is the entry point to a healthcare career — the exam you take right after a training program to become job-ready.
| Scored questions | 150 (plus 30 unscored pretest) |
| Time limit | 3 hours |
| Format | Multiple choice, computer-based |
| Passing score | 390 on a 200–500 scale (~78% of items) |
| Fee | $165 (paid to NHA at scheduling) |
| 2024 pass rate | ~81% (81.38%, per NHA) |
| Delivery | PSI test center, approved school, or live remote proctoring |
| Retake / validity | 30-day wait between attempts; certification valid 2 years |
The passing standard is a scaled score of 390, not a fixed number of correct answers — NHA scales scores so different exam forms are comparable. That's why 390 works out to roughly 78% of scored items but isn't a hard raw cutoff. Practically, aim for consistent accuracy across every domain rather than chasing one magic percentage.
The NHA CCMA Detailed Test Plan splits the 150 scored questions across seven domains. The weighting is extremely lopsided — one domain is more than half the exam:
| Domain | Weight | Scored items |
|---|---|---|
| Clinical Patient Care | 56% | 84 |
| Foundational Knowledge & Basic Science | 10% | 15 |
| Administrative Assisting | 8% | 12 |
| Communication & Customer Service | 8% | 12 |
| Patient Care Coordination & Education | 8% | 12 |
| Anatomy & Physiology | 5% | 8 |
| Medical Law & Ethics | 5% | 7 |
Clinical Patient Care is the exam. Inside it, NHA scores six subdomains: General Patient Care (28 items), Infection Control and Safety (15), Patient Intake and Vitals (14), Phlebotomy (12), Testing and Laboratory Procedures (9), and EKG and Cardiovascular Testing (6). If your prep isn't concentrated here — especially general patient care, safety, phlebotomy, and EKG — it's misallocated. The other six domains together are only 44% of the score.
You don't need a college degree. NHA requires a high school diploma or GED, plus one of these pathways:
Rules vary by state — California, for example, requires two years of work experience within the last five under its experience pathway — so check your state's requirements before you register at nhanow.com.
The CCMA is one of the more approachable healthcare certifications: the 2024 national pass rate was about 81%. But "approachable" doesn't mean easy to walk into cold. The difficulty is breadth, not depth — you're tested on clinical procedures, infection control and safety, patient intake and vitals, phlebotomy, EKG, basic pharmacology, anatomy, documentation, communication, and law and ethics. Clinical Patient Care being 56% of the exam means a single weak area there can sink an otherwise solid attempt. The candidates who struggle usually underestimate the volume of clinical detail and lean on recognition instead of recall.
Plan on roughly 40–80 hours over four to eight weeks, weighted heavily toward Clinical Patient Care. Because the score is scaled across all seven domains and you can't see which questions are unscored, you can't safely skip a domain. Spreading review across everything, and returning to each area repeatedly, beats cramming the biggest domain alone the week before.
The CCMA failure pattern is quiet: a candidate finishes a training program, reviews the material once, recognizes it all on the page, and then can't reliably recall the right step on exam day — which vital sign order, which infection-control precaution, which EKG lead. Reading and re-reading build recognition; the exam demands recall across a wide clinical surface. That gap is a solved problem in cognitive science. The techniques that close it are retrieval practice (testing yourself before you feel ready), spaced repetition (revisiting each concept right as it starts to fade), and immediately re-teaching the items you miss — especially the confident misses.
Trelos is built entirely around those techniques. The NHA prep market is thin on retention science — mostly static study guides and flat question banks — which is exactly the gap Trelos fills. It teaches each concept, drills it with exam-style questions, and schedules your reviews so the heavy Clinical Patient Care material, and every smaller domain, stays sharp through test day. It's a complete prep engine designed to take you to CCMA exam-ready on your phone, and you can feel the difference on the first session.
Start the CCMA on Trelos — freeNo credit card. Feel the retention engine work in your first session.Your official result and per-domain diagnostic post to your NHA account, and once you pass you're a Certified Clinical Medical Assistant — job-ready and able to take on advanced tasks like entering orders in the electronic health record. The credential is valid for two years; to keep it, you complete 10 continuing education credits and pay a recertification fee before it expires. Many CCMAs also stack credentials from there — a CPT (phlebotomy) or CET (EKG) certification builds directly on skills you've already been tested on. Guides for those NHA certifications are coming next in the Trelos allied health series.