By Tiffany Pankow, MD, VP, chief of caregiver wellness and patient experience

HonorHealth’s efforts to improve physician well-being include advocating for top of license policy that helps to decrease administrative burdens for physicians. HonorHealth along with ArMA and others helped to advocate for HB 2113 that passed the state legislature and will go into effect this fall.

This bill, “Expands the scope of practice of medical assistants to include communicating documented medical advice, test results and documented orders, as well as obtaining, processing and communicating medication or procedure prior authorization orders made by a doctor of medicine (MD), physician assistant (PA) or nurse practitioner (NP), outside the direct supervision of the practitioner.”  This change more accurately determines the medical assistants’ scope of practice and allows greater flexibility for team members to help cover the administrative burden.

Thank you to Michelle Pabis, Melanie Patton, MD, and Matthew Belt for their efforts that are a win/win for medical assistants who can have greater flexibility in location of practice as well as improved ability to manage administrative tasks for physicians.

Craig Norquist, MD, honored by ArMA and ADHS

Craig Norquist, MD, chief medical information officer at HonorHealth, is the recipient of the ArMA and ADHS Public Health Service Award for his work on safe prescribing, opioid overdose prevention and treatment of opioid use disorder.

Since 2008, he has been contributing to safe prescribing guidelines and more recently organizing CME events for emergency physicians for their mandatory opioid CME every year for the last seven years. Recently, Dr. Norquist has partnered with ED physicians and other to have Narcan distributed from hospitals for free to help prevent opioid overdoses. Narcan is now available for distribution in EDs and is spreading to Medical Group clinics as well. His commitment to reducing opioid misuse and overdose is now moving toward expansion of treatment education for opioid use disorder (like buprinorphine, suboxone, etc.) to both bring awareness and confidence for physicians and APPs to safely prescribe as well as to decrease the stigma of seeking care.

Congratulations to Dr. Norquist on this well-deserved recognition!