Nurse practitioners are repeatedly shown to provide high-quality cost-effective care.  Multiple studies have demonstrated the value of NPs in cost reduction.  Below are only a few of the many studies reporting NP cost-effectiveness:

In 1981, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) did a thorough investigation of NP practice and found that NPs provided equivalent to improved medical care at a lower cost than physicians.  In that report, they found that NPs cost 1/3 to 1/2 per hour less than physicians.  When the OTA did another evaluation of NP practice in 1986, the positive findings were re-established.

In 1994, a large HMO setting study published by J. Burl, A. Bonner, and M. Rao found that by adding a single NP to a practice, the patients seen could double, leading to an estimated increase in revenue of $1.65 million per 100,000 enrollees annually.

Another study in 1994, by J. Hummel and S. Pirzada, compared an exclusive physician team to a physician plus NP team in a long-term care facility.  What they reported was the physician-NP team had 42% lower costs for intermediate and skilled care patients and 26% lower costs for patients with long-term stays.  Additionally, the physician-NP team had fewer transfers to the emergency department, fewer specialty consults, and shorter hospital lengths of stays when compared to the physician only group.

 

Also published 1994, in the New England Journal of Medicine by M. O. Mundinger concluded that, "When measures of diagnostic certainty, management competence, or comprehensiveness, quality, and cost are used, virtually every study indicates that the primary care provided by nurse practitioners is equivalent or superior to that provided by physicians."

In 1995, M. Jenkins and D. Torrisi published a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, which compared a physician-managed family practice to an NP-managed practice.  The 2 groups were within the same managed care organization and the results of the one-year study was that the NP-managed practice had 43% of the total visits to the ER, 38% of the inpatient days, and a monthly member cost that was 50% of the physician’s practice.

In 2004, D.W. Roblin, D.H. Howard, E.R Becker, E. Adams, and M.H. Roberts evaluated 26 capitated primary care practices that had approximately 2 million patient visits seen by 206 providers.  They determined that practices that used more NPs and Physician Assistants (PA) had lower practitioner labor costs per patient visit and lower total labor costs per visit.

In 2006, K. Paez and J. Allen studied the management of hypercholesterolemia following revascularization in an NP group versus a physician group.  The patients managed by the NPs were found to be more likely to abide by with the prescribed regime, achieve their goals, and have decreased drug costs.