Reforming Physician Licensure in the United States to Improve Access to Telehealth: State, Regional, and Federal Initiatives.

Policy Points The reinstitution of pre-COVID-19 pandemic licensure regulations has impeded interstate telehealth. This has disproportionately impacted patients who live near a state border; geographically mobile patients, such as college students; and patients with rare diseases who may need care from a specialist outside their state. Several promising and feasible reforms are available, at both state and federal levels, to facilitate interstate telehealth. For example, states can offer exemptions to licensure requirements for certain types of telehealth such as follow-up care or create licensure registries that impose little reduced paperwork and fees on physicians. On the federal level, congressional interventions that mimic the Department of Veterans Affairs Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (VA MISSION) Act of 2018 can waive provider licensing and geographic restrictions to telehealth within certain federal programs such as Medicare. Any discussion of medical licensure reform, however, must also consider the current political climate, one in which states are taking divergent stances on sensitive topics such as reproductive care, gender-affirming care, and substance use treatments.

New Reproductive Privacy Rule to Protect Both Patients and Physicians.

This Viewpoint describes the newly finalized Reproductive Privacy Rule, a HIPAA regulatory update intended to prevent law enforcement in abortion-restrictive states from obtaining reproductive care medical records to prosecute patients and physicians.

Essentials of Informed Consent to Psychedelic Medicine.

Importance: Interest in administering psychedelic agents as mental health treatment is growing rapidly. As drugmakers invest in developing psychedelic medicines for several psychiatric indications, lawmakers are enacting legal reforms to speed access globally, and health agencies are preparing to approve these treatments. Meanwhile, US states, such as Oregon and Colorado, are making psychedelics available for supervised use outside the conventional health care system. Observations: Despite legal change and potentially imminent regulatory approval in some countries, standards for integrating psychedelics into health care have lagged, including norms for designing and implementing informed consent processes. Informed consent is complicated by the unique features of psychedelics and their means of administration. Because no governments have approved any classic psychedelics for general medical or psychiatric use, only clinical researchers have obtained informed consent from trial participants. Accordingly, there is an unmet need for informed consent processes tailored to the challenges of administering psychedelics in nonresearch settings. Conclusions and Relevance: Analysis of the challenges of designing and implementing psychedelic informed consent practices revealed 7 essential components, including the possibility of short- and long-term perceptual disturbances, potential personality changes and altered metaphysical beliefs, the limited role of reassuring physical touch, the potential for patient abuse or coercion, the role and risks of data collection, relevant practitioner disclosures, and interactive patient education and comprehension assessment. Because publicly available informed consent documents for psychedelic clinical trials often overlook or underemphasize these essential elements, sample language and procedures to fill the gap are proposed.

Advancing disability-inclusive climate research and action, climate justice, and climate-resilient development.

Globally, more than 1 billion people with disabilities are disproportionately and differentially at risk from the climate crisis. Yet there is a notable absence of climate policy, programming, and research at the intersection of disability and climate change. Advancing climate justice urgently requires accelerated disability-inclusive climate action. We present pivotal research recommendations and guidance to advance disability-inclusive climate research and responses identified by a global interdisciplinary group of experts in disability, climate change, sustainable development, public health, environmental justice, humanitarianism, gender, Indigeneity, mental health, law, and planetary health. Climate-resilient development is a framework for enabling universal sustainable development. Advancing inclusive climate-resilient development requires a disability human rights approach that deepens understanding of how societal choices and actions-characterised by meaningful participation, inclusion, knowledge diversity in decision making, and co-design by and with people with disabilities and their representative organisations-build collective climate resilience benefiting disability communities and society at large while advancing planetary health.

Using digital technologies to diagnose in the home: recommendations from a Delphi panel.

Rapid advances in digital technology have expanded the availability of diagnostic tools beyond traditional medical settings. Previously confined to clinical environments, these many diagnostic capabilities are now accessible outside the clinic. This study utilized the Delphi method, a consensus-building approach, to develop recommendations for the development and deployment of these innovative technologies. The study findings present the 29 consensus-based recommendations generated through the Delphi process, providing valuable insights and guidance for stakeholders involved in the implementation and utilization of these novel diagnostic solutions. These recommendations serve as a roadmap for navigating the complexities of integrating digital diagnostics into healthcare practice outside traditional settings like hospitals and clinics.

Whose Responsibility Is It to Define Exceptions in Abortion Bans?

This Viewpoint evaluates Texas' proposals to define the scope of the life exception for the state's abortion ban and argues that these approaches do not allow physicians to follow the national standards of care, avoid criminal liability, or have sufficient notice of what the law permits.

Returning Individual Research Results from Digital Phenotyping in Psychiatry.

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants' locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant's real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas.

Increasing Telehealth Access Through Licensure Exceptions.

This Viewpoint explains how exceptions can be used to connect patients via telehealth with a physician in another state, why this is a more practical and effective strategy, and what needs to happen for this to be a feasible solution.

The Council of Europe's AI Convention (2023-2024): Promises and pitfalls for health protection.

The Council of Europe, Europe's most important human rights organization, is developing a legally binding instrument for the development, design, and application of AI systems. This "Convention on Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law" (AI Convention) aims to protect human rights against the harms of AI. The AI Convention may become the first legally-binding international treaty on AI. In this article, we highlight the implications of the proposed AI Convention for the health and human rights protection of patients. We praise the following characteristics [1]. Global regulation for technology that easily crosses jurisdictions [2]. The human rights-based approach with human rights assessment [3]. The actor-neutral, full-lifecycle approach [4]. The creation of enforceable rights through the European Human Rights Court. We signal the following challenges [1]. The sector-neutral approach [2]. The lack of reflection on new human rights [3]. Definitional issues, and [4] The process of global negotiations. We conclude that it is important for the Council of Europe not to compromise on the wide scope of application and the rights-based character of the proposed AI Convention.

Providing Responsible Health Care for Out-of-State Patients.

This Viewpoint discusses why the legality of calling patients located in another state has suddenly been called into question.

Pediatric Drug and Other Shortages in the Age of Supply Chain Disruption.

This Viewpoint lists the top 3 pediatric drugs and product shortages, considers the federal government's and manufacturers' ethical duty to protect children, reviews the causes for the shortages, and suggests policy changes that could help fill in the gap.

Abortion Miscoding-Legal Risks for Clinicians and Hospital Systems.

This Viewpoint discusses the legal risks physicians and health care facilities may incur by miscoding a surgical or chemical abortion as a miscarriage to conceal an abortion procedure.

Pulse Oximeters and Violation of Federal Antidiscrimination Law.

This Viewpoint discusses how some pulse oximeters can provide incorrect oxygen saturation data for dark-skinned patients compared with light-skinned patients, describes the reasons that biased oximeters remained in use, and highlights why a rule recently proposed by the US Department of Health and Human Services may bring about needed change in the use of pulse oximetry for patients with dark skin.

Prevention of Bias and Discrimination in Clinical Practice Algorithms.

This Viewpoint discusses a proposed DHHS rule to address discrimination in clinical algorithms and the need for additional considerations to ensure the burden of liability for biased algorithms is not disproportionately placed on health care professionals.

Unsettled Liability Issues for "Prediagnostic" Wearables and Health-Related Products.

This Viewpoint examines the murky legal treatment of various health-related wearable or other general wellness products for patients, physicians, and manufacturers, and recommends solutions.

The oversight of autonomous artificial intelligence: lessons from nurse practitioners as physician extenders.

The development of autonomous artificial intelligence (A-AI) products in health care raises novel regulatory challenges, including how to ensure their safety and efficacy in real-world settings. Supplementing a device-centered regulatory scheme with a regulatory scheme that considers A-AI products as a 'physician extender' may improve the real-world monitoring of these technologies and produce other benefits, such as increased access to the services offered by these products. In this article, we review the three approaches to the oversight of nurse practitioners, one type of physician extender, in the USA and extrapolate these approaches to produce a framework for the oversight of A-AI products. Under the framework, the US Food and Drug Administration would evaluate A-AI products and determine whether they are allowed to operate independently of physician oversight; required to operate under some physician oversight via a 'collaborative protocol' model; or required to operate under direct physician oversight via a 'supervisory protocol' model.