Is an exam required before a patient can be treated in Pennsylvania?
Intake · part of The Practice Perimeter
Short answer
The cited rules do not settle this — no cited rule requires a pre-treatment exam, but before any delegated service the physician must find that this specific patient faces no undue risk, and may not delegate work needing physician-level skill.
Pennsylvania approaches the pre-treatment question from the DELEGATION side: the physician has to make a patient-specific judgment before anyone else touches the patient, and some services cannot be handed over at all.
Drawn from 4 verified rules in this section · regulatory monitoring, not legal advice
- 49 Pa. Code §18.402(b) · Aug 17, 2026
- 49 Pa. Code §18.402 · Aug 17, 2026
- 49 Pa. Code §18.402(a) · Aug 17, 2026
- 2024 Pa. Act 42, §§ 4702, 4705 (Telemedicine — definitions; standard of care) · Sep 8, 2026
Related Pennsylvania rules
A medical service may not be delegated where it is sufficiently complicated, difficult or dangerous that it requires knowledge and skill possessed by medical doctors but not commonly held by non-physicians, or where potential adverse reactions may not be readily apparent to someone without medical doctor training.
49 Pa. Code §18.402(b) · verified Aug 17, 2026 · read at Cornell Legal Information Institute
A physician may not delegate a procedure they are not themselves trained, qualified and competent to perform. The ceiling on what can be handed to staff is the delegating physician’s own competence, not the staff member’s.
49 Pa. Code §18.402 · verified Aug 17, 2026 · read at Cornell Legal Information Institute
How other states answer this
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Hawaii
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
Related Pennsylvania questions
- Can the pre-treatment exam be done by telehealth in Pennsylvania?
- Who may perform the pre-treatment exam in Pennsylvania?
- Can a med spa in Pennsylvania offer compounded semaglutide or tirzepatide?
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← All Pennsylvania rules and changes · MedSpaRadar is regulatory monitoring and reference: it summarizes public laws, regulations and agency actions and links each to its source. It is not legal, medical, or compliance advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. A summary can lag its source or leave out detail, and monitoring itself can be interrupted — so an absence of alerts means nothing reached you, not that nothing happened. Read the cited source, check its effective date, and confirm any change to your operations or clinical practice with qualified health-law counsel and your medical director. Legislative data via LegiScan (CC BY 4.0).