Kelsey Marksteiner: I say in my basically waiver that people are filling out that as a dietitian I can’t diagnose or treat conditions. I make that very clear when I’m working with people. I guess I’m not sure what you’re asking about figuring out the legality of virtual consults. Let me know what you mean by that. I’ll try to answer that based on what I think you mean, but let me know if this was not what you were envisioning.
As a dietitian, there are no real guidelines at this point for virtual consults, for or against. Nobody seems to know whether it’s OK or not. But since there’s no specific language out there stating that it is illegal in any way to do virtual consults, I don’t see any problem with it. There are tons of unlicensed “nutritionists” who aren’t either CDNs or RDs or have some sort of license that are doing all of this stuff as well. There are just no laws about it at this point. You can’t let that stop you at this point unless they come out with any sort of legalese saying that you can’t at any point. For now, I’m not worried about it at all. There are plenty of RDs doing it. I think if the Academy of Nutrition was like, “OK, guys, you can’t do it!” there would be such a pushback at this point because there are so many of us doing it, it would just be a total mess, so I think we’re pretty safe in doing it now. Again, there are no laws against it, but there’s just no language also stating that, “Yes, this is 100 percent OK. This is totally legal.” Yeah, it depends on what your licensing is. If you’re an RD, I wouldn’t be worried about it.
OK, you’re just saying, “In Chris’s last webinar, he mentioned that he thought you would need an in-person visit, especially when you’re actually ordering tests and interpreting them, but maybe he was referring to people with medical licenses rather than RD/nutritionist licenses.” If you’re a doctor, yes, you need to see someone in person the first time. That I do know. I’m almost 100 percent sure that’s the case. For anybody else, I don’t think there’s anything saying that. I can only speak for RDs personally. For RDs, there are no laws about that. The only thing that being in person or not affects is being able to take insurance. I don’t take insurance because I wanted to do my whole practice online. If I was going to take insurance, I would have to have a completely in-person practice at this point, I think, because you’re just not allowed to accept insurance … or insurance won’t cover any visits that are not in person. Hopefully that will change. I’m really hoping that will because at this point you can do so much online, and honestly I think, especially for nutritionist visits, it makes a whole lot more sense to do a lot of this stuff online because it fits into people’s lives more easily. When you’re talking to a nutritionist, you tend to talk to them more often than you would talk to your doctor. For example, oftentimes I see the best results with people that I’m talking to every two weeks or so. A lot of times, that can be kind of tough for people to fit into their schedule if they have to actually go to an office and do that during the day when they’re working, whereas I have a lot of people who talk to me on their lunch break at work. It’s easy because they can just call me, no big deal.
Yeah, I think it works perfectly fine, but eventually if you want to take insurance, I’m hoping that will be an option.