Physician duties · PA · New Hampshire
Signing for a Physician Assistant in New Hampshire: what the physician takes on
The agreement is mandatory for the clinician, which makes its duties mandatory for you. New Hampshire calls the instrument a Written Collaboration Agreement.
RSA 328-D:3-b (as amended by S.B. 228, 2022). A PA below 8,000 hours who practices without at least one NH-licensed physician in the group/practice/ health system must have a written collaboration agreement. Exactly how the obligation applies once a physician IS present in the group was not fully confirmed — verify before treating as settled.
Independent practice requires: ≥8,000 post-graduate clinical practice hours; Board of Medicine waiver of the collaboration-agreement requirement, obtained through the Board's waiver process — the hours threshold alone does not remove the requirement.
What you take on as the physician
The rules the physician relationship has to follow. Each fact comes from the statute or board rule listed under sources.
Proximity
Available remotely (no on-site requirement)
RSA 328-D:3-b requires the collaboration agreement to include 'processes for collaboration and consultation with the appropriate physician...as indicated based on the patient's condition' — no physical-presence or mile/minute radius standard is codified.
Supervision ratio
Not codified — no cap on file
Chart review
Not codified — left to the agreement
Meeting cadence
Not codified — left to the agreement
Prescriptive authority
Separate prescribing terms required · controlled substances permitted
PAs may hold individual DEA registration and prescribe controlled substances in NH; the collaboration agreement governs the specifics. No schedule-specific quantity/duration limit for PAs was confirmed in this research pass (unlike NC's Schedule II 30-day-supply rule) — treat as unconfirmed rather than assuming no limit exists.
Written agreement
Required
True for the default case (under 8,000 hours, or no Board of Medicine waiver). A PA with ≥8,000 hours who has obtained a Board of Medicine waiver may practice in a setting with no NH-licensed physician at all, without a collaboration agreement.
Practice ownership (corporate practice of medicine)
Non-licensee ownership permitted — New Hampshire has no independent corporate-practice-of-medicine doctrine — RSA 329 contains no prohibition on corporate employment of physicians/PAs, and the former fee-splitting statute (RSA 329:23) was repealed in 1996 (secondary-sourced: McLane Middleton). A practice MAY instead be organized as a Professional Corporation under RSA 294-A, in which case ownership is restricted to 'qualified persons' (RSA 294-A:1, :8) — but PAs are not clearly enumerated among the licensee categories eligible to hold PC shares, an unresolved gap similar to Virginia's PA-ownership question.
Secondary sources conflict here: some (Permit Health) describe NH as requiring physician ownership/control of medical practices, while others (McLane Middleton) describe no CPOM prohibition at all and confirm physicians may be direct corporate employees. Treat entity-ownership structuring as an open item requiring counsel, not a settled fact.
Legal sources for these rules (4)
What physicians charge for this role
Typical monthly compensation in New Hampshire
$500 – $600
Estimate for one Physician Assistant. Standard-tier state.
About New Hampshire's rules
RSA 326-B:11 gives all APRN categories (NP/CRNA/CNM/CNS) plenary, independent practice authority with no supervising-physician or collaborative-agreement requirement and no experience-based transition period — unlike NC/VA. PA title changes to 'physician associate' effective 1/1/2027 (not yet live). NH has no independent corporate-practice-of-medicine doctrine; secondary sources disagree on how far that extends — verify before relying on any CPOM entry below.
Other clinicians in New Hampshire: see the state overview.