Physician Assistant Research Paper

Running head: PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO MANAGED CARE ORGANIZATIONS

Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners: The impact if statutes limiting PA and NP were eliminated
Natalie L. Burnett
Kaplan University
Master of Health Care Administration Program Abstract
The purpose of this research is to explain what would happen to the level of completion in the physician services market if all statutes limiting activities of physician assistants and nurse practitioners were elimiintated. (Teacher Name, Date) demonstrate the value that a physician assistant (PA) can provide to a managed care organization. The increasing competitiveness of the health care market has caused managed care organizations to become more aware of the

This paper focuses on providing a brief history of PAs and evaluating the profession in relation to the US health system values of access, cost, and quality. Finally, patient satisfaction, crucial to MCOs in an increasingly competitive market, is discussed.
Physician Assistants
The physician assistant profession is a relative newcomer to healthcare. It originated in the 1960s with the return of medical corpsmen from the Vietnam War who had military medical skills they wanted to apply to the civilian health care market. These skills were seen as a way to extend the practice of a primary care physician, divert less acute or complex problems to the PA, and manage the need for primary care services in underserved areas (Benjamin et al., 1999).
The first PA educational program opened at Duke University in the 1960s. The advent of federal funding in 1971 allowed for expansion (Benjamin et al. 1999), and by 1999 there were 114 PA programs in the United States enrolling 4,080 first-year students (Dehn & Cawley,

The Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant requires that each PA program provide, "…classroom and laboratory instruction in the basic medical and behavioral sciences (such as anatomy, pharmacology, pathophysiology, clinical medicine, and physical diagnosis), followed by clinical rotations in internal medicine, family medicine, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, emergency medicine, and geriatric medicine" (AAPA, 2000).
Physician assistants are trained to serve as clinical partners to primary care physicians, handling routine office visits, taking call, and performing inpatient rounds so that the physician is freed up to handle more clinically intensive patient needs (Russel Johns Associates, 2001). Additionally, some PAs support physicians in certain specialty areas such as anesthesiology, radiology, neurology, and gastroenterology performing various levels of technical procedures based on supplemental training and physician granted autonomy (Grandinetti,