Practice Agreement
Build an agreement

Practice Agreement · PA

Georgia Job Description for Physician Assistants

Required. The Job Description is the written instrument Georgia 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 authoritySupervision required
Written agreementAgreement required
What Georgia calls itJob Description
Governing boardGeorgia Composite Medical Board and the Georgia State Board of Pharmacy
Agreement familyDelegation of Services
Research date2026-08-14 · clauses 2026-09-03

No experience- or hours-based pathway to independent practice exists for PAs in Georgia at any tenure — confirmed affirmatively, not merely an absence of evidence. The 2023-2024 reform (H.B. 557/H.B. 1046) expanded delegable authority and raised the supervision-ratio cap; H.B. 54 (eff. 5/25/2026) further added home-health-ordering and death-certificate-signing authority — but none of this creates a route to autonomy.

What a Georgia Job Description must contain

Governed by the Georgia Composite Medical Board and the Georgia State Board of Pharmacy. Each numbered item is a statutory requirement the agreement must satisfy.

  1. The Physician Assistant ("PA") shall not practice unless the Georgia Composite Medical Board has approved the Physician as supervising physician and has approved a written job description for the Physician Assistant, as required by O.C.G.A. § 43-34-103. The job description shall define the duties delegated to the Physician Assistant, the Physician Assistant's prescriptive authority, and the Physician Assistant's practice sites. The Physician Assistant need not be in the physical presence of the Physician, provided the Physician remains available for immediate consultation by telecommunication.

  2. A supervising physician may not have approved job descriptions in effect for more than four (4) Physician Assistants at one time, or eight (8) if the Physician Assistant has completed a Board-approved anesthesiologist assistant program, subject to the combined delegation limits the Georgia Composite Medical Board applies across a physician's Nurse Protocol Agreements and job descriptions. Any new or materially changed job description must be resubmitted to, and approved by, the Board before it takes effect.

  3. The Job Description on file also carries 1 scope, 1 education, 1 registration clauses, generated in the document itself.

Statutes and rules cited

  1. Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 480-35-.04board rule

    Requirements for a pharmacist drug therapy modification (DTM) protocol, including required protocol contents, physician diagnosis/initiation, monitoring, and termination.

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

No proximity requirement

Confirmed: O.C.G.A. § 43-34-103 has no physical-proximity/mileage clause at all — subsection (d) explicitly permits a PA to provide services 'not in the physical presence of the supervising physician.' This is a genuine asymmetry with the APRN-specific 50-mile rule (§ 43-34-25) used in the `np`/`pmhnp`/`cnm`/`cns` entries below.

Supervision ratio

Up to 8 at a time (combined across provider types)

O.C.G.A. § 43-34-103(b)(1), as amended by H.B. 1046 (eff. 7/1/2024): a delegating physician is capped at a flat 'combined equivalent of eight' APRN nurse protocol agreements and PA job descriptions together — for BOTH entering agreements and actively supervising, confirmed directly against GCMB's current guidance — raised from a prior 4-PA-specific cap. Exceptions still apply for hospitals, universities, health departments, and similar settings.

Chart review

Not codified — left to the agreement

Meeting cadence

Not codified — left to the agreement

Prescriptive authority

Covered by the practice agreement · controlled substances permitted

PAs may not prescribe Schedule I or II controlled substances as a general matter (O.C.G.A. § 43-34-103). A narrow exception effective 7/1/2024 (H.B. 557, codified at § 43-34-103(e.1)(1)(B)): a PA may be delegated authority to prescribe hydrocodone, oxycodone, or compounds thereof ONLY, in emergency situations, subject to ALL of: ≥1 year post-licensure experience, good GCMB standing, job-description-specific authorization, in-person patient evaluation, initial-prescription-only (≤5-day supply), patient age ≥18, and 1 hour biennial CE on appropriate hydrocodone/oxycodone ordering. Schedule III-V is available under standard delegated authority.

Written agreement

Required

Unconditional — Georgia's term is a 'job description,' a written document signed by the PA and 'primary supervising physician,' submitted to and approved by the Georgia Composite Medical Board (GCMB), specifying delegated acts. This term was NOT renamed by the 2023-2024 reforms.

Practice ownership (corporate practice of medicine)

Licensee-only ownership required — Georgia has no standalone corporate-practice-of-medicine statute by that name — the operative ownership restriction is O.C.G.A. § 14-7-5 (Professional Corporations Act): only persons licensed in Georgia in the relevant profession AND actively engaged in that practice may be shareholders of a PC organized for that profession. A PA is not a physician, so cannot own a medicine-practicing PC/PLLC — PA practices are typically structured with a physician-owned entity and the PA as employee.

Legal sources for these rules (7)
How the relationship works day to day
Who has to be where, how often you meet, and what the physician costs: Physician Assistant in Georgia on collaborativeagreement.com.

About Georgia's rules

Georgia remains one of the more restrictive states in this dataset — no independent-practice pathway exists for NP/PMHNP/CRNA/CNM/CNS, and a 50-mile APRN physician-proximity rule was NOT removed by 2023-2024 reform (a common misconception). That reform raised the ratio cap (4→a combined 8 APRNs+PAs) and added a narrow hydrocodone/oxycodone-only Schedule II exception — APRNs/PAs are otherwise barred from Schedule II. Georgia's primary-source sites were unusually inaccessible this pass; treat citations with extra caution pending follow-up.

Other clinicians in Georgia: see the state overview.