The Impact of Regulatory Policy on Telehealth Innovation

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Peter Ax, CEO of UpScriptHealth, discusses the future of telehealth and its potential to revolutionize healthcare. He highlights the increasing complexity of cases being handled through telehealth platforms, including specialized treatments and diagnostic testing.

Ax emphasizes the importance of streamlining access to care and reducing administrative burdens for patients and providers. He discusses the role of telehealth in addressing the challenges of prior authorizations and ensuring timely access to medications.

The conversation also touches on the impact of the DEA's recent extensions for telehealth prescribing of controlled substances, which is expected to expand access to various treatments, including sleep aids, weight loss medications, and men's health products.

Furthermore, Ax discusses the potential of AI to enhance telehealth services, from improving patient communication to predicting future healthcare needs. He acknowledges the challenges of navigating a complex regulatory landscape and advocates for a more streamlined and unified approach to telehealth regulations.

What are the key regulatory challenges and opportunities that telehealth companies like UpScriptHealth face in 2025? How can policymakers and industry leaders work together to create a supportive regulatory environment for telehealth?

The most recent example of a challenging methodology with regulations has been with controlled substances in the DEA. Last year, the DEA said, we're going to change the rules for how we whether or not telemedicine can be used to prescribe controlled substances. They went into their little corners in Washington, DC, and determined, in a very isolated sense, what they thought would be good rules for telehealth. In fact, when they put it out in, the public domain and asked for public comment. They received 10s of 1000s of comments about how those rules were wrong, and then they went ahead and pulled the rule and decided not to, not to come back to the marketplace with the rule for another year. They wanted to study it. So, I think there's a real lesson learned there.

Regulators should not try and work in a vacuum, they need to engage with the various constituencies in advance of making rules. And I think that's a really, really important lesson. But I think the biggest problem regulatory wise, that we have in this country, and as you know, up scripts been at the forefront of regulatory battles for 20 plus years. At this point, we created a lot of the rules that are out there. One of the biggest problems we have right now is we have a federal system of rules, and then we have 50 state system of rules, and each one of those rules is nuanced. In each one of those 50 states, they had various constituencies trying to get their words into legislation, and frankly, it's made a very difficult environment for companies like us to innovate, to be a leader. It's incredibly cost. Cost. There's just a very, very high cost for us having to deal with 50 states of rules. So, I wish there were just more and more federal regulation and less state regulation.