Conferences & Symposia

Roundtable on Legal Impediments to Telemedicine

Friday, April 16, 2010

Roundtable on Legal Impediments to Telemedicine

Hosted by the Law & Health Care Program
at the University of Maryland School of Law

Friday, April 16, 2010
8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.
500 West Baltimore Street
Baltimore, MD

As technology has evolved, so has the way that disease is diagnosed, treated and managed. For close to half a century, clinicians and health services researchers have been investigating the use of advanced telecommunications and information technologies to provide health care outside the traditional model of face to face encounters between providers and patients.

Providing health care services where distance separates the participants or telemedicine has boomed in recent years, not just because of technological advances but as a multifaceted response to address inadequate access to care and rising health care costs. However, as technology has improved and enthusiasm to use telemedicine has grown, the legal framework in which medicine is practiced has not evolved to meet the unique legal issues raised by telemedicine. The current legal framework at the state and federal level reflects a time when physicians and patients lived and worked in the same location. Most laws and regulations relating to licensure, credentialing, and malpractice were never designed to enable or regulate health care that is provided remotely by a practitioner in another hospital or, as is becoming more common, another state.

The Roundtable will focus on three legal impediments to the uptake of telemedicine: practitioner licensure, credentialing and privileging, and medical malpractice. The Roundtable will bring together 20-25 telemedicine stakeholders, including telemedicine industry representatives, government regulators, health care providers, and policy makers along with several legal academics. Using case studies in each area, the goal of the roundtable is to bring the stakeholders and academics together to discuss how the current legal framework prevents robust implementation of telemedicine; help flesh out specific legal impediments; and determine if there are any areas of consensus that might lead to policy recommendations and a white paper.

About the Roundtable

• Roundtable Home
• Agenda
• Participants
• Hotels
• Directions and Parking

Case Studies

• Licensure Case Study
• Credentialing Case Study
• Malpractice Case Study

Roundtable Sponsor

• UMD Law & Health Care Program