Arkansas, Idaho pass bills to allow telemedicine

telehealth

Arkansas has found a way to include telehealth in the legislation, though the new bill is more limited than the one recently rejected by the State’s House of Representatives.

The bill, SB133, allows telemedicine practitioners to be licensed as doctors in Arkansas, provided they have a pre-existing in-person relationship with their patient. Exceptions to this rule include cases of life-or-death emergency or where the provider is “simply providing information of a generic nature.” Store-and-forward technology and abortions via telemedicine are prohibited.

When it comes to reimbursements by Medicaid and private health plans, they are disallowed from charging any less for telemedicine than they would for an office visit.

“We want to open up good quality healthcare, access to specialists that sometimes only the urban areas have, to people in a rural community,” Senator Cecile Bledsoe, who sponsored the bill, said during a floor discussion. “Why would we expect people in the rural community to have less care and less quality care than we have in the urban areas?

Meanwhile, Idaho also got a telehealth law of its own, though their version is less stringent. The bill HB189 doesn’t require pre-existing face-to-face relationship with the patient, allowing a “two-way audio and visual interaction” to stand in, instead. Store-and-forward technology is also a go, but that’s not the case with abortion drugs prescriptions. Reimbursements, however, are not addressed by the bill.

Beyond Arkansas and Idaho, few other states have either passed or been mulling telemedicine legislation recently, including Colorado, Florida and Missouri.

[Via: mobihealthnews]