Can a non-physician own a med spa in Arkansas?

⚠️ Arkansas regulates the ownership interest through disclosure. The board treats it as an ethical violation for a physician to fail to disclose to a patient that the physician holds an ownership interest in a facility or service, outside the physician’s own practice, to which the physician refers that patient. Delegation is separately bounded by who the employee is: a medical assistant is defined as an employee who has been delegated tasks and who has NOT been licensed or specifically authorized to perform them. And the medical corporation act is as absolute as this corpus gets. All of the officers, directors and shareholders of a corporation subject to that subchapter must at all times be licensed under the Arkansas Medical Practices Act, and “No person who is not so licensed shall have any part in the ownership, management, or control of the corporation, nor may any proxy to vote any shares of the corporation be given to a person who is not so licensed.” Ownership, management and control are named separately, so leaving the shares in licensed hands while moving control elsewhere is reached by the same sentence. Licensed people form the entity under the ordinary Business Corporation Act, only licensed employees may treat, and the corporation needs a certificate of registration from the Arkansas State Medical Board. These claims survey §§ 4-29-305 to 4-29-309 and two board rules; they do not survey the rest of Arkansas’s entity law.