Digital Symposium: The Future of Telehealth Regulation

Published on Bill of Health

Edited by: Carmel Shachar, Faculty Director, Health Law and Policy Clinic, CHLPI

The Petrie-Flom Center often collaborates with partner institutions for digital symposia, to host critical conversations around issues in health law policy, biotechnology, and bioethics.

In collaboration with The Petrie-Flom Center, the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation (CHLPI) presents a digital symposium, The Future of Telehealth Regulation. The symposium is led by Guest Editor Carmel Shachar, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Health Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. She was previously the Executive Director of Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center. 

The articles in this digital symposium consider the challenges and solutions to facilitating cross-state telehealth. The symposium continues the conversation from a working group held in June 2023, Achieving Telehealth’s Potential. Representatives from patient advocacy groups, leading cancer care centers, children’s hospitals, and academic medical centers discussed potential, feasible avenues to reform. The goal was to create policy pathways that will allow patients to use telehealth to reach specialty care services that might be unavailable in their local communities or states. Out of this working group came a Consensus Statement for two feasible policy paths forward. The working group was funded by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund.

The digital symposium, The Future of Telehealth Regulation, will run on the Petrie-Flom Center’s blog, Bill of Health, until September 9, 2024.

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Article 1: Stuck in the Middle with You: Licensing Reforms for Cross-State Telehealth – Carmel Shachar

Article 2: Equity Implications of Telehealth Policy on Medication Abortion Care Service Delivery – Dana Northcraft & Natalie Birnbaum

Article 3: Advancing Healthcare Equity: Federal Licensure Reciprocity for Physicians caring for Transplant Patients and Donors – Rebecca Canino, Anne R. Links, and Fawaz Al Ammary

Article 4: Advancing Access to Health Care Through Federal Medical Licensure Reciprocity for Clinical Trials – Helen Hughes and Mark Sulkowski.

Article 5: The Life-Changing Benefits of Lifting State Licensure Restrictions for Telemedicine – Shannon M. MacDonald

Article 6: Pursuing an Interstate Medical Telemedicine Registration Compact – Tara Sklar