§671-7 Professional liability insurance; coverage for telehealth. [Section effective January 1, 2017.] (a) Every insurer providing professional liability insurance for a health care provider shall ensure that every policy that is issued, amended, or renewed in this State on or after January 1, 2017, shall provide malpractice coverage for telehealth that shall be equivalent to coverage for the same services provided via face-to-face contact between a health care provider and a patient.

(b) No insurer providing professional liability insurance policies shall require face-to-face contact between a health care provider and a patient as a prerequisite for coverage of services appropriately provided through telehealth in accordance with generally accepted health care practices and standards prevailing in the applicable professional community at the time the services were provided. The coverage required in this section may be subject to all terms and conditions of the policy agreed upon between the health care provider and the insurer.

(c) For purposes of this section:

"Distant site" means the location of the health care provider delivering services through telehealth at the time the services are provided.

"Originating site" means the location where the patient is located, whether accompanied or not by a health care provider, at the time services are provided by a health care provider through telehealth, including but not limited to a health care provider's office, hospital, critical access hospital, rural health clinic, federally qualified health center, a patient's home, and other non-medical environments such as school-based health centers, university-based health centers, or the work location of a patient.

"Telehealth" means the use of telecommunications services, as defined in section 269-1, to encompass four modalities: store and forward technologies, remote monitoring, live consultation, and mobile health; and which shall include but not be limited to real-time video conferencing-based communication, secure interactive and non-interactive web-based communication, and secure asynchronous information exchange, to transmit patient medical information, including diagnostic-quality digital images and laboratory results for medical interpretation and diagnosis, for the purpose of delivering enhanced health care services and information while a patient is at an originating site and the health care provider is at a distant site. Standard telephone contacts, facsimile transmissions, or e-mail text, in combination or by itself, does not constitute a telehealth service for the purposes of this section. [L 2016, c 226, §4]

Revision Note

In subsection (a), "January 1, 2017" substituted for "the effective date of Act [226], Session Laws of Hawaii 2016".