General FAQs
The Georgia Professional Health Program (Georgia PHP, Inc.) is a nonprofit organization formed in 2012 to assist all licensees of the Georgia Composite Medical Board and in 2022 the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine, who develop potentially impairing conditions, mental health/behavioral illnesses, to include depression, substance use and other addictive disorders. We are not a treatment organization. Rather, we provide initial triage, referral into treatment, treatment quality monitoring, and long-term care monitoring for addiction and other mental health/behavioral disorders. The Georgia Professional Health Program was made possible by state law passed in 2010. The law provides for a structured relationship between the medical board and the services of the Georgia PHP. An agreement was reached with the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine in 2022. We are not a licensing or sanctioning body. We are a voluntary organization and see our mission as helping Georgia healthcare and veterinary providers remain healthy and in doing so, to improve the health of all citizens of our state. We do not obtain any funding from state government or agencies. The majority of our funding comes from participant fees. We also pursue grant funding from benevolent benefactors in agencies that benefit from our services.
If you are a Georgia medical professional who needs an assessment to determine the nature of your problem, the PHP wants to send you to the best providers. Addiction and other mental health disorders when they occur in healthcare professionals take on specific characteristics that require specialized providers for the best outcome. Therefore, you should not choose any provider for this special skill. The Georgia Professional Health Program will refer you to our list of providers who have expertise in your area.
If treatment is required, we have a list of care providers we have carefully vetted for their skills in taking care of addiction disorders in our population. They understand the specific differences, work-related stressors, and licensing concerns you might have during the course of your care.
Monitoring refers to two types of interventions that promote abstinence. When abstinence is in place, it increases the probability of an individual attaining the state of recovery, but does not guarantee it.
One of the largest functions of the Georgia PHP is monitoring its participants. Monitoring refers to drug screen testing and tracking simple behavioral parameters. The drug screen testing is performed randomly to reduce the frequency of testing. A participant is required to test when selected to insure that the monitoring is accurate. Testing alone will not keep an addicted individual abstinent, but testing when combined with intensive treatment is profoundly effective.
In addition to drug screen testing, PHPs monitor a participants behaviors. Tracking attendance at support group meetings and therapy sessions are among the most common behaviors we track. Research has shown that tracking these simple behaviors increases treatment compliance and increases the probability that an individual will enter true recovery from their addictive disorder.
A PHP provides support and services for those at risk of mental health illness, such as stress, burnout, anxiety and other conditions such as substance use or behavioral disorder.
GAPHP offers services to healthcare providers who have a medical condition that could impact their clinical performance. These services include general outreach, crisis intervention, informal assessment, treatment monitoring, and support for providers who need our help. GAPHP believes that early intervention and evaluation offer the best opportunity for a successful outcome and help to protect patient safety.
The Georgia Professional Health Program follows the guidelines established by the Federation of State Physician Health Programs (FSPHP) regarding communication with hospitals and other healthcare agencies. As such, we provide quarterly letters that attest to a participants compliance with the Georgia PHP. For confidentiality reasons, we do not re-release the results of urine drug screens, evaluations, treatment, or psychotherapy records.
We do require that all of our participants sign releases for their practice and credentialing institutions prior to communication with you. If the Georgia PHP has an emergent concern about one of our participants, we will take steps to assert public safety. Because we have a signed release for credentialing institutions, we will communicate this concern as soon as is practical.
If you, your spouse or loved one has entered inpatient residential or outpatient treatment for a substance use or mental health/behavioral disorder, you do not need to contact the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine. By contacting the Georgia PHP, you are able to keep treatment confidential and at the same time protect your Georgia medical license or veterinary license.
As long as you or your loved one is maintained in a PHP-approved treatment process, you do not need to make a subsequent report to the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine. If your case becomes known to the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine at some later date (because a colleague or other concerned individual calls the board), the medical board or veterinary board may contact us. We will then, in turn, let you know about this contact and reassure the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine of your (or your loved one’s) compliance with treatment. Only in rare cases will the Georgia Composite Medical Board or Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine need to know about your situation.
If you are concerned about the mental health of a colleague, please contact us via email (webinquiry@gaphp.org) or by phone (855-694-2747). Because Georgia has its own professional health program, you can assist your colleague in obtaining confidential care. The staff of the Georgia PHP regularly receives intake calls about professionals who may be in trouble. Each case is handled uniquely, based on clinical need. Some cases require a direct referral into an assessment or even treatment. Other cases may benefit from gathering additional data about your colleague’s situation. Doing nothing when you have a concern is not a good approach. And now, thanks to the confidential Georgia PHP program, humane and definitive care is available to Georgia providers.
The Georgia PHP can direct you in obtaining additional information and in ways of helping assist a colleague to obtain needed care. We can also help you protect your hospital or practice while investigating your concerns.
If you are a physician or veterinarian in Georgia and have been arrested and/or charged in a DUI or other substance related event, it is in your best interest to contact the Georgia PHP. You will need to report this information to the medical board or veterinary medicine board and having us at your side guiding the proper response to this event is critical.
Please refer to other areas of this website and contact us for additional information.
The Georgia Professional Health Program (Georgia PHP, Inc.) provides intake, assessment, referral and long term management of physicians, physician assistants, respiratory therapists, and veterinarians with substance use disorders and other mental health/behavioral conditions. We are a non-profit 501c3 organization dedicated to the care of health care professionals and licensed veterinarians who live and work in the state of Georgia. If you have a concern about yourself, a family member, colleague or co-worker the first step is asking for help. To reach us you may send an email to us: webinquiry@gaphp.org or fill out the contact form by clicking here. If your concern is urgent, call us at 1-855-MyGaPHP (1-855-694-2747). Some will get with you as soon as possible to help.
The Georgia PHP, like all professional health programs, is not a treatment provider. Instead, we provide initial triage, referral, and treatment quality management. We carefully select and reevaluate providers who perform the actual treatment, ensuring they provide state-of-the-art care for healthcare professionals. This quality review process extends to our assessors, initial treatment programs, the substance screening process, as well as ongoing needed psychotherapy. In many ways, a PHP is like an employee assistance program whose goal it is to increase the health by managing chronic disease care.
FAQs For Participants...
...Before Joining
If you are a current Georgia physician, physician assistant, or licensed veterinarian who is practicing under a consent order due to substance use or behavioral related disorders, you should strongly consider signing up with the Georgia Professional Health Program. In most cases, the Georgia medical board or Georgia veterinary medicine board enacted a consent order to ensure you participated in the proper long-term care for your substance abuse or behavioral disorder. In such cases, the Georgia PHP can provide this care. This makes the consent order unnecessary.
Most of our current participants who previously operated under a consent order from the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine have had their consent orders terminated upon successful entry into our monitoring process. This often eliminates difficulties with hospital medical staff applications, malpractice coverage, and third-party reimbursement. In the case of some specialty boards, our participants are allowed to re-credential in their specialty after joining the Georgia PHP.
This isn’t to say that you can sign up with the Georgia PHP and not continue your treatment and recovery process. The Georgia PHP, like the Georgia Composite Medical Board and the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine, is committed to excellent care for our participants and for the safety of the general public. Part of our agreement with you is that you will participate in needed care. The rare participant who flagrantly discards proper treatment will go through a series of steps to reenter recovery. If the Georgia PHP exhausts the steps, our only choice would be to ask for the assistance of the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine in helping you get back on track.
When you sign up with the Georgia PHP, we provide you access to the Affinity online system. Each week as you see your patients or clients and the Georgia Professional Health Program, we ask that you record attendance for each participant in your group or for the sole client you see in therapy. You do not need to provide extensive notes about each session. However, if some important event occurs that needs documentation, please enter this into the system as well. Note the Affinity provides online training in the use of the documentation system. There is a help phone number on the website. We may be able to provide you with limited help, however, the experts at Affinity are happy to provide additional training.
In addition, please note that if a significant event occurs that requires our immediate attention, we urge you to contact us directly.
Prior to the establishment of the Georgia PHP, almost every physician or licensed veterinarian who developed any substance-related disorder was reported to the board. The medical board or the veterinary board would respond by requiring that physician or veterinarian to sign an agreement not to practice. Once their initial treatment was complete, such individuals made an appearance before the medical board or veterinary board and were asked to sign a consent order prior to return to practice. The consent order was essentially the medical board or veterinary board “consenting” to allow such a physician or veterinarian to return to practice as long as they agreed to stipulations regarding their illness. These consent orders were either “private” or “public.”
Initially, the private consent orders were felt to be non-discoverable documents by third-party payers and credentialing bodies. Unfortunately, over the years these agencies found ways of requiring physicians or veterinarians to report these private agreements. Physicians or veterinarians under private or public consent orders often were ejected from insurance panels, denied malpractice coverage, or even had their board certifications removed.
With the institution of the Georgia PHP, many of these onerous and punitive responses can be prevented. Physicians and veterinarians who enroll with the Georgia PHP are provided confidential care in the majority of cases. This confidential care circumvents the need for legal action by the board and prevents our participants from having to sign a “consent order.”
Unfortunately, the PHP cannot provide this anonymous care to one hundred percent of its participants. A few individuals may have legal or other issues which prevent the PHP from providing confidential support. In such cases, we work hand-in-hand with the Georgia Composite Medical Board and the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine to help maintain your health. In these cases, our participants will have a consent order from the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine and the support of the Georgia PHP.
If you, your spouse or loved one has entered inpatient, residential or outpatient treatment for substance abuse or mental health/behavioral disorder that includes the abuse of addictive substances, we strongly urge you to contact us. We can help you find the most effective care. In addition, we can help ensure that this care is obtained in the most respectful and confidential way.
If you or your loved one is a licensed (or planning to become licensed) physician, physician assistant, or veterinarian in Georgia with a substance use or mental/behavioral health condition, we urge you to contact the Georgia PHP. We can assist you in obtaining a thorough evaluation of your needs. If some type of care is needed, we also help you find the best initial care with providers who have expertise in treating addiction among healthcare workers.
Addiction disorders are chronic by nature, and require a tapering, lifelong vigilance to ensure they remain in remission. The Georgia Professional Health Program staff are among the nation’s leading experts in this area of healthcare. Once you have completed your evaluation and initial treatment, you will be placed in the PHP continuing care system which is evidence-based and has a high prognosis of an excellent long-term outcome.
But our work with you does not stop there. We assist physicians, physician assistants, and veterinarians in their relations with hospitals, clinics, credentialing bodies, board specialty agencies, and malpractice carriers. Most importantly, in the vast majority of cases our support is confidential. In confidential cases, the Georgia Composite Medical Board and the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine has agreed that they do not need to know about you and your license is protected. Protecting your license also decreases the probability that any reports will make it to the National Practitioners Databank.
We believe that working with the Georgia PHP provides a win-win situation for everyone. Physicians, physician assistants, and veterinarians obtain confidential care without the fear of reprisal and the public safety is assured. If you have questions, please feel free to call us or email us.
If you are under the monitoring and care of a professionals health program in another state and wish to move and practice in Georgia, you will need to enroll with the Georgia PHP prior to obtaining Georgia licensure. To ensure that you are appropriate candidate for the Georgia PHP, we will require records of your past treatment and monitoring. If we have questions or concerns about your monitoring or recovery, we may require you to meet with the Georgia PHP clinical staff or, in rare cases, obtain additional assessment. Most of the time we accept direct transfers from other well-established professionals health programs.
Please see the FAQ: “How do I enroll in the Georgia PHP?” for more information.
The first step in enrolling with the Georgia PHP is to request an enrollment packet. We suggest you email us at webinquiry@GAPHP.org to obtain this packet. If you have questions that this website does not answer, please feel free to email us or call us at 855-myGA PHP (855-694-2747).
There are three types of individuals who should join the Georgia PHP:
- Individuals who have a newly diagnosed substance related disorder and its related conditions.
- Individuals who are under a current Georgia Composite Medical Board or Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine consent order-based monitoring system managed by a private treatment center.
- Individuals who are in another state who would like to practice in Georgia and have a known substance related disorder and current monitoring program in their home state.
To ensure that you are an appropriate candidate for the Georgia PHP, we will require records of your past treatment, if any. If we determine that you need assessment or initial treatment, we will enroll you while you are obtaining evaluation and/or treatment.
Once you have completed the necessary paperwork, some individuals may need to be seen by our clinical staff prior to enrollment. Other individuals may be scheduled to see our clinical staff sometime after their enrollment. You will then sign up with our monitoring agency for drug screening and behavioral monitoring (tracking your self-help group and therapy attendance).
Depending on where you are in your recovery process, we will assign you to a caduceus group and/or a small group therapy. Many of our participants are directed towards individual or family therapy as well.
If you enroll with the Georgia PHP, you need not report your loved one or yourself to the medical board or veterinary board in Georgia.
...After Joining
Well-designed research studies show that frequent random witnessed urine drug screens when combined with proper psychotherapy and support group attendance produce an excellent prognosis for recovery in healthcare professionals. Checking in regarding a random urine drug screen is like a daily reminder of your illness. For reasons that we do not understand, individuals with a substance abuse disorder seem to forget that they have a lifelong disease.
The urine screens as well as twelve-step meeting attendance comprise a system that is called “contingency contracting.” By having frequent low grade interventions into your illness through contact with us and the screening process, the probability of long-term recovery is greatly enhanced.
If an individual stops screening or has a single positive urine drug screen, it may mean that the individual is early in the process of relapse. The PHP responds to these events with graded, careful interventions that help get you back onto the road towards recovery.
We understand that this monitoring process may seem at times to be a lot of work. We tend to look at it as a relatively small amount of work when compared with the daily maintenance associated with other chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus.
Participation with the PHP is confidential but there may be other parties to which you must report your participation because of contractual obligations you’ve assumed. Check your contracts to see if you have agreed to notify any entity with regards to changes in your practice (e.g. diagnosis/treatment for addiction or mental/physical impairment). Your hospital bylaws, malpractice insurance policy, and/or health insurance payor contracts may all have notice provisions requiring you to report your participation with the PHP.
Thanks to John Miller, principal and head of Medical Services Practice, Sterling Risk Advisors for this FAQ
Tell them that you are participating in the PHP. The PHP will confirm your participation but will need your written permission to provide additional information. The insurer will typically want to know about your treatment plan, dates and location of all treatment/evaluation as well as the name of your supervising and/or monitoring physician(s) and usually requests that they be kept up-to-date with your progress while participating with the PHP.
This FAQ is not legal advice and should not be construed as such. When in doubt, you should consult an attorney. Thanks to John Miller, principal and head of Medical Services Practice, Sterling Risk Advisors for this FAQ.
Affinity/Spectrum Compliance is a third-party organization that the Georgia PHP uses to help track drug screen monitoring and behavioral compliance with recovery. Affinity/Spectrum offers an organized and easy to use system that allows our participants to determine if they need to provide a urine screen. Affinity/Spectrum offers more than just that however. If you need help finding a drug screen drop site they have web-based as well as old-fashioned phone support.
We also collect our participant fees through the Affinity/Spectrum Compliance system. This allows you one portal to cover both the participant fee and the cost of urine drug screens. Finally, we ask all of our participants to track their 12 step and other support group meeting attendance using this simple online tool.
Sometimes we are asked why we have to collect so much information about you. The answer is simple. Compliance with twelve-step meeting attendance as well as negative urine screens help to produce the best possible long-term outcome from the chronic disease of addiction. In this way, the affinity tool is part of your therapy for recovery.
The Georgia Professional Health Program, unlike most professionals health programs across the United States, relies solely upon participant fees for its work. This means that the monitoring fee for physicians is currently $450 per month. If we obtain grant or other benevolent funding in the future, we hope to decrease this fee. Physician assistants, respiratory therapists, and veterinarians pay somewhat less.
Your monitoring fee goes to pay the overhead, computer hardware, office rent, and salaries of its employees. The PHP maintains a database of your drug screens, self-help group and therapy attendance. Tracking these variables has been shown to increase the rate of recovery for healthcare and veterinary professionals who suffer from addictive disorders.
The staff of the professional health program will meet with you from time to time to discuss your progress in recovery. We manage a network of providers who have proven expertise in the treatment of addiction among healthcare professionals. We run group therapies and caduceus groups that extend the network of support across the entire state.
Importantly, part of every participant’s fees goes to expanding the care for addicted healthcare and veterinary providers. At present, we are engaged in discussions with many large hospital systems across the state of Georgia, removing stigma and assisting hospital systems in credentialing and maintaining our participants within the healthcare network.
Everyone misses a check-in from time to time, nobody’s perfect. The staff of the Georgia PHP follow trends not a single event. If you continue to miss check-ins or even testing, we begin to worry about your abstinence. We suggest you make a note of why you missed a call in or internet check-in. Use this information to look at your recovery. Is it still solid? Are you ambivalent or angry? Discuss this with your sponsor as well.
If your check-ins are concerning to us, we will contact you and may require you to come in to meet with us to see if anything else should be done. Then make sure you check in tomorrow!
Traditionally, questions are posed as follows on these sorts of documents:
Question: Have you ever been evaluated for, recommended for treatment of, diagnosed with, or treated for alcohol, narcotics, or any other substance abuse, sexual addiction, anger management issues, or any mental illness, including but not limited to depression and/or depression and/or chronic fatigue?
Answer: Typically the response to the above question will be “yes” for someone who has participated with the PHP relative to any of the above items. Be prepared to provide requested details as to your status with the PHP.
—
Question: Have you ever been indicted or, charged with, or convicted of, any act committed in violation of any law or ordinance other that traffic offenses or had your hospital privileges, DEA license, medical license or reimbursement privileges refused, denied, revoked, suspended, restricted, subject to a reprimand, placed on probation or voluntarily surrendered?
Answer: You are encouraged to consult with your attorney in responding to questions of this nature. But, it is likely that the answer is “no” for PHP participants voluntarily entering the PHP and for whom regulatory or privileging bodies have not taken any action against.
—
Question: Have you ever been or are you currently under a consent order?
Answer: Participation in the PHP does not mean that you’ve had a consent order. Unless the Georgia Composite Medical Board or the Georgia Board of Veterinary Medicine issued a specific consent order against your license the answer to this question is “no”.
Most Georgia malpractice insurance policies have a “catch all” notice provision that makes it a duty of the insured physician to notify the insurer of any changes in their practice. You need to review your individual insurance policy to see if such a provision exists. According to John Miller at Sterling Risk Advisors, who represents the majority of the malpractice carriers in Georgia, “It is always best to partner with your malpractice insurer to disclose any changes that may affect patient care. It is preferable to proactively volunteer such information as underwriters see this disclosure as a positive step in your road to recovery.
Thanks to John Miller, principal and head of Medical Services Practice, Sterling Risk Advisors for this FAQ. This FAQ is not legal advice and should not be construed as such. When in doubt, you should consult an attorney.
For fairly obvious reasons, it’s a bad idea to use your own laboratory to collect or assess your urine drug screens. There is a particular skill in ensuring the “chain of custody” and proper handling of specimens for healthcare professionals. In addition, the urine screens themselves are different. Just as you shouldn’t provide medical care for your family or yourself, you should not use your own laboratory for independent screening.
The Georgia PHP believes that all who work with healthcare professionals should coordinate and work with the Georgia PHP to ensure the best possible outcome for your addiction disorder. Therefore, we encourage you to select providers who have a known expertise in the management of substance abuse among healthcare professionals. If you’re seeing a provider outside of our network, please consult with us to determine the best course of action.
Most of the time, your provider may be encouraged to join our network and assign proper releases so that we can work as an efficient team in your health and recovery.
When many substance abusing workers return to their practice, their first weeks and months often feel shaky and uncertain. In addition, some of us may have fallen behind in our skills or knowledge base during the course of our addictive disease. A few of us might have had difficulties with interpersonal boundaries, overprescribing, or setting limits in our relationships with our patients.
When this occurs, the Georgia PHP will have you set up a Supervising MD/Workplace Monitor. This individual should know the scope and the knowledge base of your practice. They cannot work for you (i.e., be your employee). Often a partner in the practice or individual at the hospital with your same specialty area is a good choice.
We will help you pick out a proper Supervising MD/Workplace Monitor. You will be required to sign a release of information. This individual will need to write letters that describe your ongoing growth in the areas of concern in your practice. The frequency of these letters will be determined by need. The length of time that this information is needed from a Supervising MD/Workplace Monitor varies from participant to participant.
We do not respond to requests regarding your medical condition or recovery status to any health, disability or life insurance carriers. We are not your treating physicians and thus have no authority to do so. If one of these agencies contacts us, we will deny that we know you for your own protection. Please take such forms to your attending physician.
Note that we do provide information to your malpractice carrier if you request us to do so. Similarly, we will provide information to health insurance carriers regarding your monitoring status if they require this information for you to maintain your provider status in a HMO or other payer network.
Every participant in the Georgia PHP will need to have an ongoing doctor/patient relationship with a physician who is an addiction specialist. If you attended treatment in a nearby treatment center, you may choose (but you are not obligated) to continue seeing the physician from your initial treatment setting.
Why do we have this requirement? The Georgia PHP believes that addiction is a chronic illness and needs chronic disease management. This does not mean that you have to see this individual weekly; however, they need to know you well enough to step in should problems arise in your recovery. If, for example, you have to undergo a surgical procedure and need addictive substances postoperatively, your addiction physician will be available to help you navigate the dangerous waters that occur when a recovering person is administered addictive medications.
Because addiction does not occur in a vacuum, your addiction specialist physician will also help with any needed psychiatric medications. They are also a resource to your primary care physician, helping them work around medications for medical conditions that have the potential to reignite your addictive disorder.
It could. But, depending on your individual profile, the insurers typically will continue coverage until such time as you are released from the PHP at which point they evaluate your risk relative to practice re-entry. If your policy is canceled by your insurer, there are plenty of options available from insurers who specialize in non-standard physician liability insurance. According to John Miller at Sterling Risk Advisors, “There is a vibrant marketplace in Georgia of insurers willing to assume the risk of physicians in transition. It is rare that a physician in our state does not have a viable option to continue coverage during or post-PHP participation.”
This FAQ is not legal advice and should not be construed as such. When in doubt, you should consult an attorney.
FAQs For Providers
Credentialing/accreditation as an approved provider for PHP participants is handled through the Federation of State Physician Health Programs – Evaluation and Treatment Accreditation process (FSPHP – ETA™). Information about this process can be found at https://www.fsphp.org/fsphp-eta-
FSPHP FAQs
Learn more about FSPHP here: https://www.fsphp.org/
FSPHP FAQs here: https://www.fsphp.org/faqs