Dive Brief:
- The Iowa Supreme Court has decided to allow the state's three Planned Parenthood clinics to administer abortion medication via telemedicine, rejecting the state board of medicine's 2013 ban.
- Since there are only three clinics in Iowa, the court said the ban would place an "undue burden" on women who would have to travel hundreds of miles to see a physician.
- The court concluded that since Planned Parenthood has used telemedicine since 2008 to treat patients and given that Iowa allows telemedicine, there was not enough evidence to argue that it couldn't be used by the organization.
Dive Insight:
Although 16 states mandate that a physician be present when the drugs are administered, others, like Texas, are trying to prevent doctors from making certain diagnoses and writing prescriptions for new patients via telemedicine, saying an initial face-to-face encounter is required.
Planned Parenthood says a trained staff member is with each patient during the procedure to monitor vital signs, collect a blood sample and perform an ultrasound. The consulting physician, via telemedicine, reviews the patient's information and then remotely unlocks the container with the abortion-inducing drugs.
"Whenever telemedicine occurs, the physician at the remote location does not perform a physical examination of the patient," said Justice David Wiggins, in a statement by the court. "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the board's medical concerns about telemedicine are selectively limited to abortion."
Mark Bowden, Iowa Board of Medicine's executive director told Reuters that "The board adopted the rule to address what it saw as the unsafe practice of medicine. The board did not adopt the rule to place an undue burden on women seeking to terminate their pregnancies." Terry Branstad, Iowa Governor, said in a statement he was "extremely disappointed" with the court's decision.