Deb Nevins, Director of Product Strategy at POCN, emphasizes the expanding role and importance of Nurse Practitioners and Physician Associates in the American healthcare system. These professionals have evolved from being an extension of the physician to becoming autonomous clinicians who handle a wide range of patient care, including diagnosing, prescribing, and creating treatment plans for a significant portion of the patient population. In many cases, NPs and PAs are filling care gaps in rural and underserved areas and applying a more holistic approach to healthcare in an increasingly virtual healthcare environment.

Deb explains, "POCN is an organization that has been around for over 10 years now. It started really with the mission to support nurse practitioners and physician associates and help them practice at the top of their license. And we do that multiple ways, but specifically we like to say it's a learn, earn, care, and connect model. So we provide educational insights to them. We allow them to connect with each other on our platforms, and we also bring them forward to pharmaceutical companies to help them better understand the role that they play in patient care today."

"Well, it's really interesting because both nurse practitioners and physician associates have really stepped up their responsibilities and roles since the timeframe when COVID started, where there was such a backlog. So they used to be thought of as more physician extenders or as mid-levels, but we can no longer say that. So nurse practitioners, physicians, and associates will handle everything with patient care from the initial intake, counseling, diagnosing, creating the treatment plan, prescribing medications, doing the follow-up, and ensuring that they're managing during side effects or anything like that that might happen. They support the patient with access challenges as they try to get their medications. So they basically do almost everything that a physician, an MD or a DO would do, except that they're not doing surgery or they're not doing super complex cases, but they have autonomy."

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