Quality of HIV care provided by nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and physicians.

BACKGROUND

Nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) are primary care providers for patients with HIV in some clinics, but little is known about the quality of care that they provide.

OBJECTIVE

To compare the quality of care provided by NPs and PAs with that provided by physicians.

DESIGN

Cross-sectional analysis.

SETTING

68 HIV care sites, funded by Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act Title III, in 30 different states.

PARTICIPANTS

The authors surveyed 243 clinicians (177 physicians and 66 NPs and PAs) and reviewed medical records of 6651 persons with HIV or AIDS.

MEASUREMENTS

8 quality-of-care measures assessed by medical record review.

RESULTS

After adjustments for patient characteristics, 6 of the 8 quality measures did not statistically significantly differ between NPs and PAs and either infectious disease specialists or generalist HIV experts. Adjusted rates of purified protein derivative testing and Papanicolaou smears were statistically significantly higher for NPs and PAs (0.63 and 0.71, respectively) than for infectious disease specialists (0.53 [P = 0.007] and 0.56 [P = 0.001], respectively) or generalist HIV experts (0.47 [P < 0.001] and 0.62 [P = 0.025], respectively). Nurse practitioners and PAs had statistically significantly higher performance scores than generalist non-HIV experts on 6 of the 8 quality measures.

LIMITATIONS

These results may not be generalizable to care settings where on-site physician HIV experts are not accessible or to measures of more complex clinical processes.

CONCLUSIONS

For the measures examined, the quality of HIV care provided by NPs and PAs was similar to that of physician HIV experts and generally better than physician non-HIV experts. Nurse practitioners and PAs can provide high-quality care for persons with HIV. Preconditions for this level of performance include high levels of experience, focus on a single condition, and either participation in teams or other easy access to physicians and other clinicians with HIV expertise.