Is Pennsylvania ready for medical marijuana to become more than just an exercise in approving business plans and training doctors? Because patients throughout the state definitely are.

Last week, when the state opened its patient registry for the first time, more than 1,000 people registered for access to the drug — which state officials have said should become available to patients within the next six months.

If that’s a harbinger of what’s to come in terms of patient demand, doctors in this state are going to be very busy whenever the Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana program finally goes live next year. Last week the state Department of Health announced that it had approved about 100 physicians statewide to participate in the program. Another 200 are currently going through the training program for approval, according to the department.

Up until now we’ve been focused mostly on the administrative and bureaucratic elements of the medical marijuana program: who is making decisions about which companies get to produce the drug? Where are those companies located? What’s the state’s timeline for getting the drug to patients and will the program be responsible and sustainable?

But another vital part of this process are the professional who provide the final link between patients and the drug. In September the state launched its registry program for doctors amid widespread questions about whether doctors would embrace medical marijuana in sufficient numbers.

Low doctor participation has proved to be a serious problem for some other states — like New York, which has only managed to enroll about 2 percent of the state’s active physicians in a program that launched in January of 2016. The Pennsylvania Medical Society’s position against the state’s medical marijuana law raises the question of whether or not that will happen here in the Keystone State.

So far, however, doctors seem to be embracing the program steadily. Butler County has a respectable compliment of doctors that have gone through the state’s training program and been approved to prescribe medical marijuana. According to the DOH doctors with offices in Saxonburg, Butler, Sarver and Valencia have been approved to certify patients’ medical marijuana use. Even better, those doctors’ specialties range from internal medicine to hospice and palliative medicine, family medicine and emergency medicine.

That this many doctors are already willing to participate in Pennsylvania’s program is encouraging. We hope that medical professionals across the state continue to embrace the effort to get patients access to treatments that can improve their lives.