Effective patient care requires clinical knowledge and understanding of issues that enable PA practice and affect the delivery of care.
These pages provide professional practice information for PAs, PA students, supervising physicians, practice managers, and administrators. Employers also will find resources here to help them employ and deploy PAs.
Ethics
Physician assistants are expected to behave both legally and morally. These resources, including Guidelines for Ethical Conduct for the Physician Assistant Profession, guide PAs in making ethical decisions.
Employment
Practical information for employers and for PAs seeking employment. It covers steps to take, contract topics, what “supervision” looks like, and team practice advice. This section also links to information about independent contracting and ownership.
Practice Ownership
Ownership in a professional corporation can be complex for PAs, due to their clinical relationships with physicians and the intersection of professional licensing and corporations law. This page contains information about which states allow PAs to own practices, as well as helpful resources for PAs who are thinking of becoming practice owners.
Hospital Practice
Hospital practice is highly regulated and can lead to many questions about physician-PA teams delivering care, particularly in institutions that have never encountered PAs before. Here you will find many useful documents that address the most common questions about PAs and hospital practice. Joint Commission standards and Medicare requirements feature prominently.
Supervision
Physician assistants (PAs) practice medicine with physician supervision. Misperceptions abound. There are many contexts in which supervision questions arise – new grad versus experienced PA, what state law says, what the Joint Commission says, what a local hospital requires, what a specific physician believes is appropriate, what patients expect, etc. The resources on this page help to answer those questions.
Malpractice Insurance
Malpractice insurance may seem simple at first: employer hires PA and adds PA to practice policy. End of story. It is not that simple. While employer-provided coverage is common, PAs sometimes are better off having their own individual malpractice policy that changes jobs with them, covers them for moonlighting, and has liability limits just for them. There are many options, which are laid out in these pages.
Specialty Practice
PAs practice with physicians in virtually every medical and surgical specialty and subspecialty. This section provides descriptions of successful models, links to PA specialty societies, data about each specialty, and more.
Studies about the PA Profession
There are numerous studies published about the practice record of the physician assistant profession, including research on quality, cost-effectiveness, and patient satisfaction, and more.
