The Ehealth, Telehealth and Telemedicine Blog

American Telemedicine Association Survey – Please Complete

Dear Colleagues: Broad deployment of telemedicine requires common approaches and uniform practices. For over ten years ATA has been developing practice guidelines for the delivery of safe and effective healthcare via telemedicine. These guidelines are developed in cooperation with leading practitioners, researchers, societies and vendors. Nine such guidelines have been formally approved by the ATA [...]

FREE Webinar, June 6th: 3 Reasons SKYPE May be RISKY to Your Practice & How to Remedy

Register for a FREE webinar entitled, “3 Reasons SKYPE can be RISKY to Your  Practice & How to Remedy.”  With HIPAA requiring compliance, licensed professionals can be caught in the crosshairs if a problem arises when opting for these free video services.  Traditional telehealth standards of care call for much more robust and IT-staff supervised [...]

Does Video Contact with Clients or Patients Require HIPAA Compliance?

If a US-based company isn’t claiming HIPAA compliance, my tendency is to recommend against using them for the delivery of telepsychiatry, telepsychology, online therapy or online counseling in the US, until they make claims for which they can be held accountable by our federal consumer protection agencies. That includes email, chat rooms, telephone or videoconferencing.

Telehealth & Telemedicine Reimbursement Resources

While Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement is available for telehealth and telemedicine, resources to help us access this information is not well organized or easily accessible online yet. I’ve compiled these sources, and am happy to post the ones I’ve found here, but please add to them by commenting below if you can.

What’s Your Mental Health Professional Association Doing to Support Responsible Internet-based Telehealth Practice?

1. Are you aware of any other statements, ethical decisions, announcements or other documents for independent practitioners seeking guidance for practice through the Internet as produced by any of the large US professional associations?

2. Do you live in a country other than the US, and have a professional association that has published such a document?

If you are aware of any such resources, please leave links or details in the comments section below.

The Psychotechnologies: Developers Convene at the American Telemedicine Association’s Conference, May 16-18, 2010

As for the development of the psychotechnologies needed for expanding promote telemental health care, the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) has been bringing together vendors, researchers and clinicians from all medical disciplines from around the world since 1993.

Email or Chat Room and Skype-based Counseling and Psychotherapy: The Professional Standard of Care

Our legal standard of care has not yet been expanded to include email, chat room or exclusive Skype-based counseling or psychotherapy. Until it is, practitioners using these telecommunication tools could find it difficult to defend themselves if something goes wrong.