Group rules against online treating of unknown patients

With input from the Federation of State Medical Boards, the eRisk Working Group for Healthcare issues stronger guidelines for Internet consultations.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Dec. 23/30, 2002.

A consortium of medical societies, medical liability carriers and others is demanding that physicians engage in online consultations only with established patients, and not with patients they've neither seen nor treated before.

A previous set of guidelines developed by the eRisk Working Group for Healthcare encouraged, but did not mandate, that doctors do online consultations with established patients, said Edward Fotsch, MD, CEO of Medem Inc., an online consultation service partly owned by the American Medical Association, a member of the consortium. The new guidelines were toughened in part to help physicians stay out of trouble with medical licensing boards, several of which have taken disciplinary actions against physicians for treating, diagnosing and prescribing medications online to patients whom they had never met.

Input from the Federation of State Medical Boards marked the first time the group had participated in eRisk's guideline development. The two groups said they had worked together because each had separate guidelines governing the practice of medicine online and wanted to make sure any new guidelines conformed to each other's as well as to those of the AMA.

And although the guidelines are voluntary, both the eRisk Working Group and the FSMB hope that the guidelines will serve as a standard for state licensing boards. [...]