Adventures in telepsychiatry

In Is telepsychiatry legal in Maryland? I mentioned that I was puzzled by the lack of information regarding what was and was not legal for me to do in the state of Maryland, so I dropped an email to Michele Phinney, the director of the Office of Regulation and Policy Coordination in the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in Maryland.

I was really pleased to get a reply in less than 24 hours. In it, she said that a proposal had been by the Board of Physicians in August, 2009, and that something like this proposal was likely to be adopted by the end of 2009.

Basically, my read on the proposed regulations was that

• Both the patient and I needed to be in Maryland,
• I needed to put some more information on my website, including my MD license number and status  (I already have a HIPAA form there),
• That I was going to need to write an informed consent form, and
• I needed to keep the usual medical records.

I could also see that even doing an evaluation over the Internet was probably legal, but I decided that I wasn’t going to do that initially.

I just wish that all my interactions with people who worked for the State of Maryland were as good as my experience with Michele Phinney. She rocks!