Comparison of Physician and Nurse Practitioner Colposcopic Quality of Care for Patients Referred with ASCUS Papanicolaou Smears in a Health Maintenance Organization

A Profile of Advanced Practice Clinician Membership in the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology

“…Lonky et al [10] compared outcomes between physicians and NPs in a large health maintenance organization and found that NPs inspected more carefully, performed a greater number of biopsies, and thus identified greater numbers of advanced abnormalities than physicians. Shackelford et al [11] investigated the use of pathology resources by gynecologic and nongynecologic providers (family practice physicians and 1 NP) performing colposcopy.…”

“…The authors concluded that payers would be better served by using gynecologists rather than nongynecologists when evaluating women with abnormal Pap tests [11]. However, recent data strongly suggest that the precision of colposcopy is debatable and may not be a function of clinical training or specialization, but rather that sensitivity is optimized when multiple biopsies are collected [10,12,13].…”