Legislators in Texas have passed an Act that will come into effect September 1, 2011 which will enable the development of a system to reimburse providers of telemedicine and telehealth services under the state Medicaid program. This is significant in itself but, of wider interest, is that to do so they have weighed into the terminology maze and, nevertheless, defined three services:
- Home telemonitoring service (remote monitoring of data related to a patient’s health and transmission of the data to a licensed home health agency or a hospital) [Excludes ‘telecare’ in the UK sense of the word. Ed. Steve]
- Telehealth service (not a telemedicine service but requires use of advanced telecommunications technology other than telephone or fax) [‘Telehealth’ in the Telehealth Ontario sense or as in the UK’s ‘NHS Direct’ type services? Oh, hang on, those use the telephone in one of their modalities… Ed. Steve]
- Telemedicine medical service (for patient assessment, diagnosis or consultation or treatment, or for the transfer of medical data)
Full text of the Act with complete definitions.
UPDATE 8 June: For three more US legislation-driven definitions, see this item: Telemedicine is an enabler of health reform by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn.