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Delegation Agreement · PA

Utah Delegation of Services Agreement for Physician Assistants

Required. The Delegation of Services Agreement is the written instrument Utah law names for a Physician Assistant working with a physician. Below: the board that governs it, what it must contain, and the terms it has to carry.

Practice authorityConditional independence
Written agreementAgreement required
What Utah calls itDelegation of Services Agreement
Governing boardUtah Physicians Licensing Board and the Utah Board of Pharmacy
Agreement familyDelegation of Services
Research date2026-09-03 · clauses 2026-09-03

Three experience tiers (§ 58-70a-307): <4,000 hrs — practice under written practice-level collaboration policies (no individual agreement); 4,000-10,000 hrs — written collaborative agreement with a physician or a 10,000+ hr PA in the same specialty; ≥10,000 hrs — no agreement required at all.

Independent practice requires: ≥10,000 hours of post-graduate clinical experience (below this, see agreementRequiredNote for the two lower tiers).

What a Utah Delegation of Services Agreement must contain

Governed by the Utah Physicians Licensing Board and the Utah Board of Pharmacy. Each numbered item is a statutory requirement the agreement must satisfy.

  1. The Physician Assistant ("PA") shall practice pursuant to a written Delegation of Services Agreement jointly developed with the Physician, as required by Utah Code § 58-70a-501 and Utah Admin. Code R156-70a-501. The agreement shall address the Physician Assistant's prescriptive authority, including for controlled substances, the degree and means of supervision, and the frequency and mechanism of quality review, and shall be kept on file at every practice site.

  2. A supervising physician may not supervise more than four (4) full-time-equivalent Physician Assistants without prior written approval from the Division of Professional Licensing based on extenuating circumstances. Where the Physician Assistant is not under the direct on-site supervision of the Physician, the Physician shall remain available for immediate consultation by electronic means.

  3. The Delegation of Services Agreement on file also carries 1 scope, 1 education, 1 registration clauses, generated in the document itself.

Statutes and rules cited

  1. Utah Code § 58-17b-102statute

    Defines "collaborative pharmacy practice" and "collaborative pharmacy practice agreement" and includes collaborative pharmacy practice, drug therapy management, and therapy initiation within the practice of pharmacy.

Terms it has to carry

Ratio, proximity, chart review, meeting and prescribing terms the agreement has to carry, from the state's supervision rules.

Proximity

Available remotely (no on-site requirement)

No on-site or mile/minute standard is codified. Secondary-sourced guidance (collaboratingphysician.com, 2026) describes a requirement for 'a method of immediate consultation by electronic means' when the PA is not under the collaborating physician's direct on-site presence — this detail could not be independently confirmed against statute/rule text in this research pass.

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

Once a PA reaches the 10,000-hour independent tier, prescribing is no longer agreement-gated in the same way — this entry describes the collaborative-tier baseline.

Written agreement

Required

Only the middle tier (4,000-10,000 hrs) requires an individually-executed written collaborative agreement. Below 4,000 hrs, collaboration instead runs off written practice-level policies rather than a per-PA agreement; above 10,000 hrs, no agreement of either kind is required. `agreementRequired: true` reflects the middle tier as the representative default.

Practice ownership (corporate practice of medicine)

Licensee-only ownership required — Professional Corporation (Utah Code Title 16, Ch. 11) or Professional LLC (§ 48-3a-1106) — Utah does not enforce a strict corporate-practice-of-medicine doctrine by case law, but its Professional Corporation Act requires all owners of a PC/PLLC organized to provide PA services to hold a license in that same profession (single-profession PC rule); non-licensees may not hold equity in that entity.

Whether a PA may independently own a single-profession PC/PLLC (rather than co-owning with a physician) was not conclusively confirmed — Utah's Professional Corporation Act doesn't clearly enumerate PAs as ineligible, but no PA-specific ownership ruling was found either. Flag as unconfirmed.

Legal sources for these rules (4)
How the relationship works day to day
Who has to be where, how often you meet, and what the physician costs: Physician Assistant in Utah on collaborativeagreement.com.

About Utah's rules

S.B. 36 (2023) eliminated the physician-collaboration/contract requirement for ALL APRN roles (NP, CRNA, CNM, CNS), not just NPs — Utah is a full-independence state across the APRN scope. PAs remain on a separate, hours-tiered collaboration model (Utah Code § 58-70a-307) with no numeric ratio cap or chart-review percentage codified.

Other clinicians in Utah: see the state overview.