How Many WGU Clinical Hours Can Be Telehealth?

It depends on your track. WGU sets a different telehealth ceiling for each NP program:

• MSN FNP: telehealth may count for up to 10 percent of clinical hours, which works out to 65 of the 650 direct patient care hours.
• MSN PMHNP: telehealth may count for up to 75 percent of clinical hours, reflecting how much psychiatric care is delivered remotely.

The remaining hours must be completed in person with your approved preceptor at an approved site. Both tracks require 650 direct patient care hours logged across three Clinical Internship courses (Clinical Internship I, II, and III) in Term 5, with a per-course split of roughly 215, 215, and 220 hours. Confirm the exact split against your current WGU student handbook, since program requirements change. Kansas residents seeking Kansas licensure who started on or after March 1, 2025 complete 750 hours instead of 650, so their telehealth math scales accordingly.

Because family practice depends on hands-on physical assessment. Family nurse practitioners are trained to perform in-person exams, palpation, procedures, and point-of-care evaluation, so WGU limits FNP telehealth to 10 percent to protect the hands-on component of your training.

Psychiatric mental health care, by contrast, is routinely delivered by video and telephone, and remote care is now a mainstream part of the PMHNP scope. That is why WGU permits PMHNP students to complete up to 75 percent of their hours via telehealth. Even so, PMHNP students still need meaningful in-person experience, so plan for a substantial share of hours face to face with your approved preceptor.

Generally, synchronous live patient encounters delivered remotely count, while passive observation or administrative time does not. WGU expects telehealth hours to be genuine direct patient care, meaning you are actively participating in a live encounter with a patient under your preceptor's supervision, not simply watching a recorded visit or doing charting.

In practice, that usually means:

• Live video visits where you interview, assess, and help manage a real patient in real time.
• Telephone encounters that qualify as direct patient care under your preceptor's supervision.
• Remote follow-up and medication management visits, which are common in PMHNP settings.

Time spent on documentation, chart review, or shadowing without patient interaction is not direct patient care and should not be logged as clinical hours. When in doubt, ask your Placement Coordinator on the Clinical Learning and Placement Support (CLPS) team before you log the time, because hours entered incorrectly can be rejected later.

You log every hour, telehealth or in person, on WGU's Field Experience Page and Activity Log inside the Student Portal. WGU does not use an outside logging vendor for the core hour count; the Field Experience Page and Activity Log are the official record your evaluators review.

A few practices keep telehealth hours clean:

• Record telehealth encounters as you complete them rather than batching them at the end of a term.
• Note the encounter type so it is clear which hours were remote and which were in person, which matters when you approach the 10 percent FNP cap.
• Track your running telehealth total against your cap so you do not overshoot and have hours disallowed.

Individual sites may layer their own compliance onboarding on top of WGU's system through platforms like ACEMAPP, CastleBranch, or similar, and background checks and immunizations run through DISA Healthcare Technology (formerly American DataBank) on the Complio platform. Those are compliance steps, not where you log hours; hours always live on the Field Experience Page.

It means your FNP preceptor and site must be able to deliver the vast majority of your hours in person, so plan around the 90 percent in-person requirement from the start. Because WGU makes you find your own preceptor and keeps no list, you are responsible for lining up a site where at least 585 of your 650 FNP hours can happen face to face. A telehealth-heavy clinic that cannot offer enough in-person time will not work for an FNP rotation, even if the preceptor is perfectly qualified.

For PMHNP students the calculus is more flexible, since a remote-heavy psychiatric practice can carry most of your hours, but you still need an in-person component. This is exactly the kind of fit we verify before you commit. Our independent placement service identifies and confirms a WGU-approvable preceptor and both required clinical sites, then shepherds the Affiliation Agreement so your hours clear on time. You pay only once the preceptor and site are confirmed.