If you hate when physicians are called providers, you now have a new reason to be annoyed: It may be an ethics issue.
That’s the stance of a new position paper issued by the American College of Physicians, which looks at the ethical implications of lumping physicians in with other clinicians and calling them all providers. The paper, which was published in Annals of Internal Medicine, is urging clinicians, health systems, and policymakers to stop using the term “provider” to describe physicians.
The paper argues that the term “provider” diminishes physicians’ professional identity by reframing the patient–physician relationship as a commercial transaction. The relationship should be an ethical partnership, the thinking goes, so calling physicians providers undermines physicians’ clinical integrity and professionalism.
“The term provider is derogatory because it diminishes the physician-patient relationship,” ACP President Jason M. Goldman, MD, said in a press release. The organization argues that the term blurs important distinctions between the ethical practice of medicine and commercial service delivery, referring to the effect as “deprofessionalization.”
The paper explains that using the term provider to describe everything from health care institutions to physicians and other clinicians “lumps impersonal entities in with humans and obscures differences in clinical training and expertise.” Because the term provider often describes a transactional process—a company that supplies the hospital with linens, for example, is a provider—it implies that physicians play a transactional role in health care.
As a result, the paper says, using the term provider downplays physicians’ dedication to patients and their ethical obligation to put patients’ interests first. For those reasons, the paper also urges physicians to avoid using terms like “covered lives” and patient “leakage,” which focus on health care as an “industry.”
