In today’s video, we return to the question as to whether physician prescription by telemedicine is legal or not.

I’m Michael H. Cohen, founding attorney of the Cohen Healthcare Law Group. We help healthcare industry clients just like you navigate healthcare and FDA legal issues so you can launch, or scale, your health and wellness business.

In our earlier scenario in the latest video, a psychiatrist wanted to prescribe ketamine, a controlled substance, to patients in states in which the psychiatrist was not licensed.

What’s our legal analysis of that scenario?

Now this very scenario, prescription of medication across state lines, happened in the early days of telemedicine.  The case was called, Hageseth v. Superior Court, a Colorado physician was charged with practicing medicine without a license in California, when he prescribed Prozac to a California patient.

This was novel at the time, it was 2007.  The prescription was based an online questionnaire only, which was not a good call by the physician at the time.  At any rate, the Court seemed to express shock that the unlawful conduct consisted entirely of “Internet-mediated communications.”

Are you shocked? These days, everybody buys online, and the fact that the transaction is entirely mediated by the internet is not such a big deal.

So the telemedicine laws have changed, they liberalized, but there are still very, very nuanced rules and these vary from state to state.

Now sometimes law firms or websites, claim they have some all-inclusive chart and if you simply consult the chart you’ll have all the answers. Well, it’s kind of like consulting the stars, and you might decide that it’s September, and your moon is in Leo – and that’s why, maybe your finances are improved. I don’t want to discredit it, it might be a valid theory, but I think that life is complex and just resorting to a chart that somebody sells to you as a panacea is not necessarily the wisest approach.

So, we want to go state by state and look into the nuances of the actual telemedicine laws, regulations, and sometimes these are put forth not by the legislators but by state medical board itself – and they can change, especially with regard to prescription.

We’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of telemedicine clients just like you and we’d love to work with you.

Thanks for watching. If you have any questions, feel free to send us a message or book an appointment at cohenhealthcarelaw.com/contact. We look forward to talking with you soon.