Licensure Portability Program

Description

This notice announces the opportunity to apply for funding under the Licensure Portability Program (LPP). The primary purpose of the LPP is to provide support for state professional licensing boards to carry out programs under which licensing boards of various states cooperate to develop and implement state laws and related policies that will reduce statutory and regulatory barriers to telemedicine. Though this program’s statute refers to telemedicine, for the purposes of this notice, the terms telemedicine and telehealth are interchangeable. Telehealth is defined as the use of electronic information and telecommunication technologies to support and promote long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health, and health administration. Technologies include video conferencing, the internet, store-and-forward imaging, streaming media, and terrestrial and wireless communications. Through telemedicine technologies, a health care professional may deliver care from a distant site in a separate state from the patient’s originating site. This wide reach has allowed telemedicine to emerge as a promising modality for increasing health care access, especially in rural areas and communities with workforce shortages. While telemedicine has the capacity to facilitate the delivery of health care over long distances, there may be statutory or regulatory barriers to delivering care across state lines. Licensure policies may differ from state to state, and individual states may require a license in the state where the patient is located. To address this, this program seeks to support innovative multi-state collaborations that would enable licensed health care professionals to practice telemedicine across states (i.e., licensure portability). This notice of funding opportunity solicits applications from a broad range of licensing boards with a clinical or non-clinical focus (e.g., medicine, nursing, psychology, counseling, therapy, social work, or other licensed health professionals with the capacity to utilize telehealth in the provision of service to patients). Initiatives to support licensure portability for telehealth may focus on the design and enactment of new state policies and on assistance to support successful implementation of enacted state policies to maximize their impact. Applications are encouraged for projects focused on licensing strategies or professions not previously funded under this program. We are particularly interested in national efforts to help state licensing boards work together to reduce the burden on clinicians who provide telehealth services in multiple states.

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