Language molds perceptions, defines roles, and creates shared understanding. The term “provider” has seeped into health care vernacular, applied indiscriminately to anyone who delivers health services. However, this broad brush diminishes the extensive training, expertise, and responsibility that comes with the role of the physician. It is time we critically examine its effect and curb the misuse of provider before the term “doctor” all but disappears.

The Language of Transactions

Language carries with it the weight of history, power dynamics, context, and societal values. The shift toward calling physicians providers reflects a worrying trend towards depersonalization and deprofessionalization of the practice of medicine.¹ This nomenclature casts physicians less as respected leaders and members of the health care team, and more as a transactional unit of value that can be deployed for revenue generation. According to Mangione et al., there has been a problematic “adoption by medicine of the language and metrics of business, so that academic efforts have been transmogrified into relative value units (RVUs); physicians into providers; and patients into clients, customers, and consumers.”² This trend erodes “medicine’s core mission.”² Renaming physicians as providers is a “sign of the ongoing industrialization of medicine.”³

In a 1993 New York Times Magazine article, physician David Worth, an early critic of the term, presciently warned that: “It is easy to regulate providers but more difficult to regulate doctors, as people have a mental picture of their own doctor’s care. Let us not devalue our physicians by terming them providers. This is just one step away from limiting what they say and depriving them of their ability to make professional decisions.”⁴ This prophecy rings true as physicians increasingly have lost autonomy to make professional decisions and run or influence their practices.

The Power of Language

The clearest origins of the term as applied to physicians in the United States are found in the 1960s with the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid services.^3,5 It has spread rapidly in the last two decades and is now commonplace in academic publications, in the press, by the public, and even by physicians and medical students.

Labels and names influence self-concept and behavior and can become a “self-fulfilling prophecy that defines a person’s internalized role.” Paydarfar et al., note that “the title provider could be acting in this way to subliminally alter our own professional self-concept and behavior.” The shift is from a role that is relational and patient-focused to one that is transactional and task- and metric-focused.³