Telemedicine in Texas

As COVID-19 spreads through our communities, there are steps you can take to minimize contact
with patients. A primary step is to implement telemedicine. TMA has developed some quick tips to help you get started.

 
Going forward, medicine will have to ask of telemedicine’s new, broader role in health care: Is it here to stay? Or is its rise merely the product of temporary, extraordinary circumstances? Physicians tell Texas Medicine that depends how telemedicine will be regulated and paid for.

This week, one of the Texas Medical Association’s go-to authorities on telemedicine will talk to congressional lawmakers about the future of remote care and what it needs to be successful – as well as tout Texas’ progress in regulating it.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will allow physicians to issue prescriptions for all schedule II-V controlled substances via telemedicine as long as specific conditions are met.

Building on the recent work of its Telehealth Initiative collaboration with the TMA and others, the American Medical Association is offering physicians more guidance on how to create a telehealth foundation in their practice.

AMA’s Telehealth Immersion Program will feature interactive peer-to-peer learning sessions, webinars, on-demand resources, and virtual discussions and boot camps.

The Telehealth Initiative – a program launched in January 2020 by The Physicians Foundation, American Medical Association, Texas Medical Association, Florida Medical Association, and Massachusetts Medical Society – didn’t anticipate the pandemic. But it did anticipate telemedicine’s potential wealth of applications for care. And when the pandemic hit – two months into the initiative’s yearlong quest to educate physicians and practices on telehealth and promote its use – telemedicine became more of an on-the-job training proposition than any participant had imagined.

A growing number of physicians are embracing telemedicine.

Because most physicians still have no first-hand experience with it, they have many questions about how it will help them and their patients.

Telemedicine is rapidly evolving, and the number of physicians who use it continues to grow.

Whether you use telemedicine every day in your practice or you’re just starting to consider how it might benefit your patients, you probably have plenty of questions and concerns about using it effectively and within compliance.

That’s why the Texas Medical Association formed a task force that will help TMA serve physicians who want to integrate telemedicine into their practice.