One of the common questions asked when considering changes to APRN regulations in red states, is ‘How will this change impact liability and malpractice issues in state?’

There is no research to show that negative outcomes occur when a state becomes a yellow or green state.

A comprehensive research article by Hooker, Nicholson and Le (2009), looked at 17 years of data in the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). The NPDB is a federal registry that has recorded actions reported on licensed health care providers since September 1990.

Malpractice payments for all the study years for physicians, physician assistants and APRNs exceeded $74 billion. APRN payments comprised only 0.007 percent of the total. The data in the study indicated that APRNs were 16.4 times less likely to make malpractice payments than physicians.

The article can be found here: