Access and Innovation in a Time of Rapid Change: Physician Assistant Scope of Practice

The article describes a synopsized history of physician assistant practice including a description of the legal and medical communities' unwillingness to recognize the benefits of increased PA utilization, including marked increases in access to, and quality of, care in both general and specialized medical fields. After an examination of the development of the medical practice regulations that expand many healthcare professionals' scopes of practice to tasks previously restricted to physicians, the paper identifies the PA profession as a workforce innovation ripe for increased integration into the PA-physician team in the future of healthcare. Read article ​