Indiana Medicaid pays for teleconsultations

The state is encouraging wider use of telemedicine to improve access to specialists for rural patients.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 1, 2006.

Indiana's Medicaid program as of May 1 began reimbursing physicians for telemedical consultations in which primary care physicians and their patients remotely access the services of specialists located hundreds of miles away via videoconferencing.

While almost every state reimburses for telemedicine services such as teleradiology in which doctors don't "see" patients directly, only half, including Indiana, pay for telemedicine services in which doctors use a real-time video connection, said Jonathan D. Linkous, executive director of the Washington-based American Telemedicine Assn.

The AMA's policy is that physicians should uniformly be compensated a fair fee for their professional services whether the consultation is rendered by telephone, fax, electronic mail or other form of communication.

Under the Indiana program, referring physicians will be paid a flat administrative fee of up to $21.86 while specialists will be paid the same fee as if they had seen a patient in person, said Marc Sirkin, deputy communications director at the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, which oversees the state's Medicaid program. That means the level of physician reimbursement will vary according to the services they perform, Sirkin said.