Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This blog has been a proponent of increased use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants to reduce the cost of health care. However, do they really reduce the cost of care? On the one hand, NPs and PAs cost less than physicians. On the other hand, if patients must visit an NP/PA and then a…
If you are an avid reader of this blog, you’ve heard about nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). What you might not know is how they popularity has grown over the past decade. A paper by Strange (2013) cites the following statistics: With more than 85,000 PAs and 150,000 NPs eligible to practice, their…
Nurse practitioners (NPs) are non-physician clinicians that can often either assist or directly provide primary care. Some studies have found that NPs can independently manage 80 percent of patients’ primary care needs. Other studies show that NPs provide high-quality care. A recent article, however, suggests that NPs may not be cost effective. This is a curious…