Telehealth provider MDLive says that it’s the first company to offer telepsychiatry and other virtual mental-health services in all 50 states. The Sunrise, Fla.-based company recently added practitioners in Mississippi and Vermont to fill out the map, Med City News reported.
“It’s national now,” MDLive Chief Behavioral Health Officer John Sharp, M.D., told the news service. “In a way, it’s not earth-shaking because we’re all going to everywhere soon.”
“I think it’s going to be one of the new norms. You can’t imagine banking without ATMs or online services anymore.”
MDLive, founded in 2009, says it now has more than 1,300 behavioral-health practitioners in its network of online healthcare professionals. “We had to go scouting around,” Dr. Sharp said. “We had to get board-certified, licensed doctors” in every state.
Med City noted: “Indeed, with the exception of physicians employed by the federal government, state licensure has long remained a hurdle to wider deployment of telehealth and telemedicine. A physician providing remote medical services generally must be licensed in the state where the patient is located, though the situation has improved somewhat in recent years.”
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