Karen Edison, MD

Karen Edison, M.D., is a clinician, educator, and researcher, with health policy expertise. She received her medical degree and completed her residency in dermatology at the University of Missouri in Columbia where she joined the faculty in 1993. She served as Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and then majority health policy staff for the Health Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee in the United States Senate from 1999-2001, where she was instrumental in the legislative expansion of Medicare reimbursement for telehealth services. She was a key member of the legislative team that drafted the reauthorization of the Community Health Center Programs and spent two years as key staff in a bipartisan coalition that developed the “Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act”, which was finally signed in to federal law in 2005. She returned to Missouri in 2001 where her current titles include Philip C. Anderson Professor and Chairman of the Department of Dermatology, Medical Director of the Missouri Telehealth Network (since 2001), and Co-Director of the Center for Health Policy at the University of Missouri in Columbia (since 2002).

Dr. Edison serves on the Telemedicine Taskforce of the American Academy of Dermatology as well as the Policy Committee, Teledermatology Special Interest Group and Peer Review Committee of the American Telemedicine Association. In 2002 she served as the Co-Chair of the Telehealth Leadership Conference. She has been an investigator on a number of telemedicine research programs, including a comparison of live interactive and store-and-forward teledermatology to in-person exam for the Office for the Advancement of Telehealth