Who oversees AHPs?

Today’s quick tip is a question from an audience member of the webcast, Overcoming Competency Assessment Challenges: All About Advanced Practice Professionals. Below, Sally Pelletier, CPMSM, CPCS, advisory consultant and chief credentialing officer of The Greeley Company in Danvers, Massachusetts discusses the terms collaborating physician, supervising physician, and sponsoring physician, all of whom have a relationship with allied health professionals.

Are the following terms interchangeable: collaborating physician, supervising physician, and sponsoring physician?

It is going to be dependent on what your state law defines as a collaborative or supervising situation. PAs are always supervised, NPs, depending on state statute, and what your individual hospital requirements are, can either be supervised or practicing under a more collaborative arrangement. So I don’t see those terms as interchangeable although we frequently use them within the same context because if that practitioner cannot go hang out a shingle on their own or practice in the hospital setting if the hospital requires supervision--is it the state that requires a collaborative agreement or not or is it a hospital saying we are going to put stricter requirements around our folks even though the state allows them to practice independently, we want them supervised in our hospital setting. They are not exactly interchangeable but you would use them sort of in the same context. And for me, sponsoring physician just means either supervising or collaborating physician.