Resources

Three reference works and a growing set of state guides. This is the part of the site people bookmark.

The law, from the top down

The legal side comes in two layers. How state telemedicine laws work covers the state layer: who may treat a patient, the standard of care, consent, most prescribing rules, and the corporate practice of medicine. Federal telehealth laws covers the federal layer: DEA controlled-substance rules, HIPAA, Medicare and Medicaid coverage, fraud and abuse, and FDA device rules. Read both if you are new to the legal side.

The state law comparison table lines the states up side by side. The state-layer explainer is written in the tradition of the state law surveys the original Telemedicine Today published, and the page that legacy academic citations still resolve to. It covers licensure, compacts, prescribing, consent, and Medicaid across the states at the level of pattern and exception.

The state guides

The state law guides go one state at a time and one level deeper: the actual statute, the board rule, the Medicaid policy, and the parity law, with the source linked. Each guide answers the same questions in the same order so states can be compared side by side. Guides are published only after they have been researched and sourced. States without a guide yet are marked as in progress.

The cross-state licensing tracker is a reference table for the interstate compacts. It shows which states belong to the physician, nursing, psychology, physical therapy, counseling, PA, and social work compacts, with membership status read off each compact's own commission and, where verified, the effective date and enacting bill. Compacts that have not been verified against a primary source are marked as unverified rather than filled in from memory.

The glossary

The telehealth glossary defines the field's terms in plain English: the difference between telehealth and telemedicine, synchronous and asynchronous care, originating and distant sites, the modifiers and place-of-service codes, and the acronyms that policy documents assume you know. Link to it from your own training materials if it helps.

How these pages are maintained

Every resource shows a published date and an updated date. Volatile items, especially anything touching Medicare flexibilities or DEA prescribing, state the date a rule currently runs through, cite the rule or law that set it, and tell you to verify current status before relying on it. When a rule changes, the page is updated and the date moves.

If you find something out of date, tell us. Corrections are how reference pages stay reference pages.