Doctors and patients are calling for more telehealth. Where is it?

But doctors are generally allowed to practice medicine only where they have a license. This means they cannot treat patients across state lines unless they also have a license in the patient’s state, and most physicians have one or two licenses at most. This has led to what Ateev Mehrotra, a physician and professor of health policy at the Brown University School of Public Health, calls an “inane” norm: A woman with a rare cancer boarding an airplane, at the risk of her chemotherapy-weakened immune system, to see a specialist thousands of miles away, for example, or a baby with a rare disease who’s repeatedly shuttled between Arizona and Massachusetts. While eligible physicians can currently apply to practice in states besides their own, this can be a burdensome and impractical process. For instance, let’s say you are an oncologist in Minnesota, and a patient from Kansas arrives at your office seeking treatment. The patient will probably want to do follow-up appointments via telehealth ... Read full article.