Phone prescription draws Idaho sanction

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20140427/INFO/304279999

From the article:

But Idaho’s medical licensing board doesn’t approve and earlier this year punished a doctor for prescribing a common antibiotic over the phone. The sanctions against Dr. Ann DeJong are so severe that her board certification is threatened.

DeJong, a 38-year-old doctor, is licensed to practice medicine in nine states including Idaho, but the Idaho Board of Medicine sanction has triggered reviews of her licensing in all those other states and now threatens her board certification.

Concerned about how many patients she was seeing who couldn’t get in regularly to see a primary care doctor, she signed up in 2012 with a telemedicine company called Consult-a-Doctor. The company would refer calls to her for consultations in states in which she was licensed to practice.

On Feb. 9, 2012, she consulted by phone with a patient in the Boise area who had severe cold symptoms, aches and pains, and a slight fever. DeJong advised the patient to treat the symptoms but also offered to call in a prescription for an antibiotic to take if the patient’s fever rose or her symptoms worsened, a move the patient welcomed.

Rusche, the physician and state representative who co-sponsored the telemedicine bill, said, “I think that perhaps the Board of Medicine ought to look at their policy, because there’s lots of us who have called in prescriptions for patients that we have never examined personally.”

That includes doctors who are covering patients for other physicians on call, he noted. “They don’t have the therapeutic relationships, they haven’t examined the patient. . It doesn’t seem to be consistent with the actual practice.”

Kerr said the only other time the board has permanently sanctioned a doctor for something similar to DeJong’s offense was in a 2001 case in which a North Idaho ophthalmologist was prescribing opiates over the phone to multiple patients without ever seeing them.

I guess that you should never take the word of a corporation that wants you to put up your license… to do things that they indicate are legal.. particularly those entities that don’t have a license to lose !

Filed under: General Problems