Medical Regulation
State medical and osteopathic boards in the United States took 5,721 disciplinary actions against physicians in 2009, an increase of 342 actions over 2008, according to a report by the Federation of State Medical Boards. Writing in the introduction to the report, Chaudhry cautioned against using those numbers to compare or rank states. "Changes in a board's funding, staffing levels, changes in state law and many other factors," he said, "can impact the number of actions taken by a board."
In an interview with the New York Times about telemedicine and virtual medicine, Chaudhry noted that the Federation of State Medical Boards' guidelines define a patient-doctor relationship as "clearly established and begun when a physician agrees to undertake diagnosis and treatment of the patient, and the patient agrees." He stressed the importance of ensuring that patients receive the same standard of care online as in person. "It should be the same exact standard as if the patient was in your examining room," he cautioned. "You can't cut corners."
From 2009 Chaudhry has served as Secretary of the Management Committee for the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities. In 2010, and again in 2012, he was elected representative of the United States to IAMRA's General Assembly.
On March 13, 2013, Chaudhry and Lance Talmage, M.D., Chair of the FSMB Board of Directors, received a bipartisan letter signed by U.S. Senator John Thune of South Dakota and seven other U.S. Senators (Thomas Carper, Roger Wicker, James Inhofe, John Barrasso, Mike Enzi, Tim Johnson, and Lamar Alexander) applauding "the efforts of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) on the work you are doing in examining solutions that would allow for more efficient sharing of medical licensure information that is necessary for the advancement of telehealth technology." The letter expressed the hope that the FSMB can leverage resources "to develop a proposal that satisfies the myriad of complex issues associated with licensure portability."
Read more about this topic: Humayun Chaudhry
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