ATA To Offer Accreditation For Online Healthcare
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
The American Telemedicine Association announced it will be launching an accreditation program for telehealth providers.
The American Telemedicine Association now offers an accreditation program for online, direct-to-consumer healthcare consultations. The ATA announced the program will “accredit U.S. healthcare entities providing real-time, online consultations directly to the patient that meet specific standards.”
“ATA’s Accreditation Program is designed to ensure transparency and patient safety as online services for healthcare proliferate,” said Jonathan Linkous, CEO of ATA. “We’ve seen an explosion of online healthcare service offerings in recent years, and a growing need to assure consumers they are making good choices.”
MobiHealth News writes the program will not cover email consultations or pure store-and-forward plays like certain dermatology apps. The ATA’s goal is to assure consumers and payers that the accredited services are meeting some basic requirements for safe and responsible practice.
“We also very strongly support the accreditation programs operating in the hospitals and that’s an important role,” Linkous told MobiHealthNews. “But in this segment where you go direct-to-consumer, that’s an area that’s kind of wide open and really important for us to help separate the wheat from the chaff and establish some guidelines.”
Through the accreditation program, providers will be required to meet standards to ensure consumers and payers that the services are safe and secure. iHealth Beat reports that these standards are built from best practices as well as federal and state regulations.
“There ought to be some way for consumers to know what they’re getting and also they need to know that who they’re dealing with is a trusted source, that they’re licensed providers that are operating in the rule of law. … They need to have something in place, some efforts to work toward quality — some form of review of the quality control for the site. And we need to know they have some form of record they’re maintaining and if they can provide that information to the primary care physician of the patient,” says Linkous.