Keeping pace with an educational shift, publisher Merion Matters has revamped and renamed its publication ADVANCE for NPs & PAs. As of March, the allied-health magazine is now known as Nurse Practitioner Perspective.

The daily website will continue to publish fresh content and will keep the “NPs & PAs” name and URL. An NP & PA newsletter, sent to around 75,000 and 80,000 subscribers, is also keeping its name.

[Update: reader reaction to this story prompted Merion Matters to contact MM&M to note that the ADVANCE e-newsletter and website will “continue to be valuable to both the PA community as well as the NP community,” and clarified that by NP the publisher means NPs and DNPs.]

The print publication’s name change follows a move that’s being made in academia. Schools are slowly phasing out the master’s level of Nurse Practitioner training in favor of doctorate-level education as of 2015.

The new title also includes an endorsement of Doctors of Nursing Practice Incorporated, which will also provide a column about the doctors-of-nursing movement in every print issue.

The print publication will also focus on what a survey of its 100,000 reader base showed are their interests: business topics, practice ownership, prescribing issues and legal concerns.

“The most common or significant themes are going to be scope of practice. Nurse practitioners have been working very hard…to gain independent practice authority,” editor Michelle Pronsati told MM&M. Many states require that NPs be affiliated with a doctor’s office, even though they may have a distinct physical location.

Prosanti says the editorial team had already been thinking about these issues for their readers, so the survey confirmed that they were going in the right direction. “It was great to see it written down that what we were developing or thinking would be a good mix of content,” she said.

Marketing supervisor Jessica Weisbrot added that the publishing schedule for the advertising-supported print publication was designed for ease. “I think the bi-monthly, honestly, makes it digestible…we’re all starved for time.”

Weisbrot said one thing she’d like to see change on the advertising side would be greater interest from technology firms. “More NPs are going to be able to have their [own] practice,” she explained, which means a greater need for the technology that is most often associated with a physician’s office.