1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Specialty Treatment to Access and Referrals Act of 2019 or the STAR Act . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Telemedicine involving the delivery of safe, effective, quality health care services by a health care provider using electronic information technology as the mode of care delivery is a clinically appropriate and efficient method of furnishing many health care services. (2) Consultations between health care providers utilizing electronic information technology (in this section referred to as E–Consult services ) are feasible in a variety of settings, flexible in their application, and particularly useful in facilitating the timely provision of information from a clinician with specialized knowledge of a relevant medical subject matter to a treating clinician in order to improve care quality. (3) E–Consult services formalize the role of medical specialists, can be undertaken entirely within electronic exchange platforms that are private and secure, and do not require synchronous communication between providers. (4) E–Consult services conducted in advance of a telemedicine service can improve the effectiveness of the subsequent telemedicine service. (5) E–Consult services are being utilized extensively by the Veterans Health Administration and by a growing number of academic medical centers and other public and private health care settings both in the United States and internationally. (6) There is a need for additional extensive and rigorous research studies to determine best practices and processes for E–Consult services and to validate the impact on access to specialty medical care, costs, and clinical outcomes. (7) Providing the expertise and technical assistance necessary to implement E–Consult services in primary care settings could improve access to specialty care at relatively low cost while simultaneously providing a testbed to evaluate the merits of varying approaches to E–Consult services, ascertain the value of such programs, and experiment