American College of Physicians policy paper urges medical community to drop the term “'provider"

The American College of Physicians (ACP) has published a policy paper arguing that referring to physicians as “providers” carries ethical consequences that extend beyond semantics and ultimately contribute to the erosion of professional identity, trust, and the physician-patient relationship.

In the paper, ACP situates the debate within decades-long concerns about the commercialization of medicine. Building on earlier warnings from leaders such as Arnold Relman and Edmund Pellegrino, the authors describe how corporatization, physician employment, and market-driven health care structures have contributed to “deprofessionalization”—an impairment of physicians’ ability to practice in accordance with ethical and professional standards. The widespread use of the term “provider,” the paper argues, reflects and reinforces this shift.

The paper notes that historically, the word “provider” entered health care through Medicare and Medicaid legislation that was passed in the 1960s, where it was used to describe entities delivering reimbursable services. Over time, the term has expanded to encompass physicians as well as other clinicians, despite its roots in commercial supply language. The ACP contrasts this with the origins of words such as patient, physician, medicine, and compassion—which emphasize vulnerability, duty, knowledge, and relational care rather than a transaction.

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