American College of Physicians Calls for An End of the Term 'Provider' in Policy Paper

This article was originally published on our sister site, OphthalmologyTimes®.

The American College of Physicians (ACP) has released a policy paper asserting that the use of the term “provider” to describe physicians carries ethical implications that go beyond semantics and may contribute to the erosion of professional identity, trust, and the physician–patient relationship.

In the paper, ACP places the discussion within longstanding concerns about the commercialization of medicine. Drawing on earlier critiques from figures such as Arnold Relman and Edmund Pellegrino, the authors outline how trends including corporatization, increased physician employment, and market-oriented health care systems have driven what they describe as “deprofessionalization,” limiting physicians’ ability to practice in alignment with ethical and professional standards. The widespread adoption of the term “provider,” the paper argues, both reflects and reinforces this broader shift.

The authors note that the term “provider” entered the health care lexicon through Medicare and Medicaid legislation in the 1960s, where it was used to denote entities delivering reimbursable services. Over time, its usage expanded to include physicians alongside other clinicians, despite its origins in commercial and supply-based language. In contrast, ACP highlights the roots of terms such as patient, physician, medicine, and compassion, which emphasize vulnerability, responsibility, expertise, and relational care rather than transactional exchange.

The policy outlines several ethical concerns with the term:

• First, it notes that “provider” obscures the differences in training, expertise, and responsibility among different clinicians, which can potentially confuse patients when they are navigating increasingly complex care teams.
• Second, it argues that the term mischaracterizes the nature of medical care itself. Unlike commercial services, the patient–physician relationship is grounded in ethical duties, including beneficence, nonmaleficence, respect for autonomy, and justice. Physicians are obligated to place patients’ interests above their own, even when doing so conflicts with financial or institutional pressures.
• Third, the paper further argues that language shapes professional identity and behavior, and referring to physicians as providers risks reframing medicine as a transactional service rather than a moral and relational practice. This framing may undermine accountability, altruism, and public trust, which are foundational to medicine as a learned profession.

ACP ultimately recommends abandoning the term “provider” when referring to physicians. Instead, the group notes that physicians should be called physicians, and broader care teams should be described using terms such as “clinicians” or “health care professionals.” The organization concludes that preserving ethical medical practice requires language that reflects medicine’s humanistic obligations: prioritizing relationships, professional judgment, and patient-centered care over commercial abstraction.

You can read the paper here: Physicians Are Not Providers: The Ethical Significance of Names in Health Care: A Policy Paper From the American College of Physicians