The executives and managers of virtual care clinics could potentially be held to mandatory accreditation standards.
The wild west era of telehealth is potentially coming to a close, with the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care releasing a set of draft standards for virtual care quality.
All virtual care providers – e.g., single-issue telehealth clinics, GPs who provide telehealth to existing patients, hospitals which provide remote patient monitoring, and virtual emergency departments – will be encouraged to implement the standards.
The commission also said it would consider “a range of options for assessing whether expected standards of safety and quality are met” and that this “may include an accreditation scheme”.
The draft standards, which were released for consultation last week, were largely the same as the draft third edition NSQHS standards but with virtual care-specific requirements added.
Under the standard for enabling high-quality and integrated clinical practice, for instance, an additional requirement was that clinic executives and managers have organisational systems to “ensure treatment decisions, including prescribing, align with best practice and are free from commercial influence”.
Another added requirement, this one under the “building a healthy workforce culture” banner, was to support clinicians to meet their national boards’ professional obligations when prescribing and providing care through digital and virtual means.
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The draft standards also proposed regular monitoring of clinicians’ professional performance, verification of qualifications and scope of practice, and reviews when new models of care or technologies were introduced.
There was also an emphasis on coordinated and connected care, with requirements for treating clinicians to support continuity of care by providing treatment summaries to a patient’s regular care provider.
Over the past 18 months the telehealth sector has been under increasing scrutiny, particularly in relation to potential commercial conflicts of interest in vertically integrated clinic models, and to GLP-1 receptor agonists and medicinal cannabis.
Independent federal MP Dr Monique Ryan has repeatedly called out the growing number of telehealth companies with commercial ties to medication wholesalers.
“When vertically integrated companies with in-house pharmacists have existing commercial relationships with pharmaceutical companies, it’s in their best interests to prescribe and dispense drugs to patients,” Dr Ryan told The Medical Republic in early September.
That month, AHPRA put out interim guidance on managing commercial and financial conflicts of interest which specifically called out business models where an organisation owned or controlled multiple aspects of healthcare; for instance, a clinic which was “designed to provide patients with a pre-determined diagnosis, assessment, medicine, device or treatment that are also sold by the same business”.
Failing to meet expected professional standards outlined within a national board’s code of conduct had potential consequences for a practitioner’s registration.
The final standards are expected in late 2027.
