I generally dismiss these “equivalent outcome” studies. Any midlevel will (and should) bounce the more complicated cases to their supervising physicians. Outcomes at that point are meaningless.

There’s definitely a trade off between resources devoted to education vs. acceptable risks from failed procedures, missed/delayed diagnoses, and increased utilization of imaging and referrals (and the physician radiologists and others who participate in that - it goes full circle). Physicians now are probably on one extreme end of that, and midlevels on the other.

On the topic of servicing rural areas… the problem is that nobody with better options (which includes midlevels) wants to live in these places. These educated, high-earning people want to live in urban areas, and they can. CMS has tried to incentivize this with billing by offering higher reimbursement rates to rural places that have a midlevel on staff. That’s about it, though.

> the problem is that nobody with better options (which includes midlevels) wants to live in these places.

Or the problem is that people are not offered enough money to make the sacrifices they would make by living in rural places.

> I generally dismiss these “equivalent outcome” studies. Any midlevel will (and should) bounce the more complicated cases to their supervising physicians. Outcomes at that point are meaningless.

If midlevels can successfully detect complicated cases to a supervising physician, and handle a whole lot of other care independently... and the net result is equivalent outcomes... this isn't a massive win? You've conserved the really expensive and contended resource for where it's needed and not made anything worse...

It's not so clear cut for a few reasons.

#1 - Funky/misleading statistics - Generally they claim that these NPs with uncomplicated patients do as well as physicians with complicated patients. It's not claiming that of any randomly selected patient, regardless of who they see, the outcome is the same. Therefore, if uncomplicated patients saw physicians, outcomes for the physicians could improve. In primary care managing hypertension or diabetes, this isn't as pertinent. For something like anesthesiology, it's more so counting how many times shit hits the fan, and brain cells die when the anesthesiologist takes time to be summoned.

#2 - They're not conserving expensive resources. Imagine a patient comes in with a lump on their hand. An NP might see a weird lump, order an MRI which gets read by a radiologist, refer to an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in the hand, who removes tissue to send to a pathologist, who determines it's a common benign tumor of the fascia. That's three physicians who spent much more time here! The patient no longer has use of their interphalangeal joints. The physician would probably try to shine a light through it, note the patient's Scandinavian ancestry and family history of plantar fasciitis, and tell them to live with it and come back if it changes.

No resources were saved here, but the patient's DASH score (disability of the arm, shoulder, and hand) is still 0 so the outcomes are the same.

This happens all the time.

#3 - Bad incentives - Medicaid would not in a million years cover this, but the game of medical pinball where patients bounce around through in-network referrals can funnel those with decent insurance into procedures. Especially when most people have poor health literacy. A hospital executive probably just splooged in his pants seeing how much money their loss-leader of primary care is driving to radiology and the surgical specialties where they actually make money.

#4 - It's insincere. All of this can be viewed as possibly successful when the midlevels are part of the healthcare _team_ and know their limitations. But the NP groups are increasingly pushing for independent practice and prescribing rights in state legislatures across the country. CRNAs require a physician supervisor... in many places, that doesn't necessarily need to be an anesthesiologist, and the surgeon performing the procedure can suffice. The AANA recently changed its name to the "American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology"... It used to be "Anesthetists". The CEO and president (two different people) of the American Nurses Association both refer to themselves as "Doctor" in a healthcare setting even though one holds a DNP and the other a PhD. It's pervasive.

> Generally they claim that these NPs with uncomplicated patients do as well as physicians with complicated patients.

The studies I've seen have compared practices where NPs are seen first vs. physicians are seen first.

> They're not conserving expensive resources. Imagine a patient comes in with a lump on their hand. An NP might see a weird lump, order an MRI which gets read by a radiologist, refer to an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in the hand, who removes tissue to send to a pathologist, who determines it's a common benign tumor of the fascia. That's three physicians who spent much more time here!

Your claim is this kind of excessive testing and referral doesn't happen with physicians? Do you have some kind of evidence this is more common with NPs?

This kind of overtesting leading to unnecessary procedures and bad outcomes has been pervasive through care in the US. Don't blame it on NPs.

> Bad incentives - Medicaid would not in a million years cover this, but the game of medical pinball where patients bounce around through in-network referrals can funnel those with decent insurance into procedures. Especially when most people have poor health literacy. A hospital executive probably just splooged in his pants seeing how much money their loss-leader of primary care is driving to radiology and the surgical specialties where they actually make money.

Ditto

> It's insincere. All of this can be viewed as possibly successful when the midlevels are part of the healthcare _team_ and know their limitations. But the NP groups are increasingly pushing for independent practice and prescribing rights in state legislatures across the country. CRNAs require a physician supervisor...

Welp, we're not creating anywhere near enough residencies to create enough physicians to do the work, so I'd suggest we'd figure out ways to either do that or use people with lower levels of training well (preferably both!).