Health Professions Regulation in the United States

In the US, states are primarily responsible for the regulation of health professions. The structure and content of state-specific health professions regulation has significant impacts on the delivery of health care services. This is particularly important given that health reform initiatives are designed to improve population health through the provision of accessible, high quality, and affordable basic health services. There is concern that existing state-based, profession-specific regulatory structures cannot easily support the workforce innovations necessary for health reform. Aspects of the current system that constrain the effective and efficient use of the health workforce include mismatches between professional competence and legal scopes of practice, lack of consistency in legal scopes of practice across states, limited flexibility to support overlap in scopes of practice across professions, and the slow and adversarial process for changing scope of practice rules.