Washington Administrative Code
Title 246 - Health, Department of
HEALTH PROMOTION AND CHRONIC DISEASE PREVENTION
Chapter 246-562 - Physician visa waivers
Section 246-562-010 - Definitions

(1) "Applicant" means an entity with an active Washington state business license that provides health care services and seeks to employ a physician at a Washington state practice location(s) and is requesting state sponsorship or concurrence of a J-1 visa waiver.

(2) "Board eligible" means having satisfied the requirements necessary to sit for board examinations.

(3) "Department" means the Washington state department of health.

(4) "Employment contract" means a legally binding agreement between the applicant and the physician named in the visa waiver application that contains all terms and conditions of employment including, but not limited to, the salary, benefits, length of employment and any other consideration owing under the agreement.

(5) "Full time" means a minimum forty hours of medical practice per week, not including call coverage, consisting of at least thirty-two hours seeing patients on an ambulatory or in-patient basis and may include up to eight hours administrative work for at least forty-eight weeks per year.

(6) "Health professional shortage area" or "HPSA" means an area federally designated as having a shortage of primary care physicians or mental health care.

(7) "Hospitalist" means a physician, usually an internist, who specializes in the care of hospitalized patients.

(8) "Integrated health care system (system)" means an organized system in which more than one health care entity participates, and in which the participating entities:

(9) "Low income" means that a family's total household income is less than two hundred percent of the federal poverty level as defined by the U.S. Federal Poverty Guidelines published annually.

(10) "Physician" means the foreign physician eligible to be licensed under chapter 18.71 or 18.57 RCW named in the visa waiver application, who requires a waiver to remain in the United States to practice medicine.

(11) "Practice location" means the physical location where the visa waiver physician will work.

(12) "Primary care physician" means a physician board certified or board eligible in family practice, general internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology, geriatric medicine or psychiatry. Physicians who have completed any subspecialty or fellowship training, excluding OB or geriatric training, are not considered primary care physicians for the purpose of this chapter.

(13) "Publicly funded employers" means organizations such as public hospital districts, community health centers, local, state, or federal governmental institutions or correctional facilities, who have an obligation to provide care to underserved populations.

(14) "Sliding fee discount schedule" means a written delineation documenting the value of charge discounts granted to patients based upon family income up to two hundred percent of the annual federal poverty guidelines.

(15) "Specialist" means a physician board certified or board eligible in a specialty other than family practice, general internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology, geriatric medicine or psychiatry (the current definition of "primary care" for the waiver program).

(16) "Sponsorship" means a request by the department on behalf of an applicant to federal immigration authorities to grant a visa waiver for the purpose of recruiting and retaining physicians.

(17) "Vacancy" means a full-time physician practice opportunity that is based on a planned retirement, a loss of an existing physician, or an expansion of physician services in the service area.

(18) "Visa waiver" means a federal action that waives the requirement for a foreign physician, in the United States on a J-1 visa, to return to his/her home country for a two-year period following medical residency training.