November 29, 2016 – Expanded Team

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Anchor lead: Physician assistants may soon provide much of the care to hospitalized patients, Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you’re hospitalized and most of your care is provided by a physician assistant, or PA, should you be worried?  No, a study led by Henry Michtalik and colleagues at Johns Hopkins concludes.  Michtalik compared outcomes from two groups of hospitalized patients, one with expanded numbers of PAs, and found no compromise in care.

Michtalik: I think patients should expect to see more and more different providers with different roles.  As we expand the healthcare team, and each provider is becoming more and more specialized, it really is a team effort.  There’s a lot of different individuals with great expertise and great specialties working together.  One of the take home messages too is that in this study the advanced practitioners were really working with the doctors. It was more of an extension of one provider to another rather than a different provider seeing the patient.  :31

Michtalik says prompt, clear communication between all providers is key.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.