On Friday, July 23, 2010 the North Carolina Medical Board met and gave final passage to a Board policy on Telemedicine. The final policy should appear on the Medical Board’s website soon; in the meantime, you can read the language approved by the NCMB Policy Committee here. After receiving feedback from the NC Medical Society and the NC Chapter of the American College of Radiology, NCMB staff removed language regarding informed consent and also omitted the fees section of the policy.
at 7:50 pm
This is an absolute necessity that doctors who are making determination about medical care involving residents of NC should be licenced in this state. These individual usually work for the insurance companies and their goal is clearly to restrict services to increase their profits. The current insurance commissioners appear impotent with regard to appropriate oversight.It is even worse when it comes to the NCIC. There are no rules, just whatever they can get away with. For those and many more reasons, we no longer see workers comp cases.As for hospital concerns, they are focused on eliminating private practice and control of revenue at the expense of patients.
at 1:43 pm
this telemedicine policy protects radiologists and pathologists who are mainly hsopital based.without telemedicine smaller hospitals would risk losing coverage after hours.
this policy does not affect the real problem that office based physicians face which relates to precert of medications and procedures.
you kinow that currently nc licensure is needed to deny a rpocedure but that licensure is not needed for the review process. eg i can spend hours on the phone with some nonlicensed retired doc in arizona only to be told that i then need to call back to a doc with an active license. this policy should state that all medical, admin and and review activities must be done by mds with active nc licenses