Telehealth refers specifically to clinical service (telemedicine) and non-clinical services like administrative meetings, provider training and continuing medical education. It is actually an understatement when we say telehealth facings a lot of legal concerns especially regarding cross-state practice, licensure requirements and reimbursement policies. Legal issues that faces this industry are much more complicated than you can think, that’s why you may require the help of a professional in order to get license to offer telehealth services and also legal advice just to stay in business.
Ethics is a big part of medical services disbursement. It underlines the do’s and don’ts that every provider should observe during service delivery. Every telehealth provider seeks to provide professional medical care in the most respectable manner possible. However, when it comes to telehealth, the landscape changes how ethics in medicine are handled. This is because, unlike the usual face-to-face meeting between a GP and patient, telehealth involves a provider and patients who are not in the same room and may not even know each other.
Due to this ethical challenge, telehealth attorneys seek to inform medical providers of what new ethical challenges they should expect to face in the field and how to tackle them. Since telehealth appeals to a wide target market, i.e. the entire nation, providers have to deal with broader ethical issues as opposed to localized institutions.
In addition to that, telehealth works in a different way. Information is disbursed to a broad demographic and providers have to be alert who they are sending this information to. Likewise, providers need sufficient information about clients before formulating how to attend to them to avoid creating any ethical mistakes.
Part of the ethical challenges that telehealth attorneys can help their clients address include: controlling what information flows between provider and the patient, controlling who sees information sent from providers (Ads included), ensuring protection of any personal information collected during treatment, determining who is eligible for telehealth (age and sanity are huge factors here), controlling when information is disseminated to patients, regulating hours of operations, being sensitive to cultural and religious beliefs, and many more.
Obviously, being a relatively new field/profession, telehealth presents a huge ethical challenge and will continue to do so in the near future. This further enforces the need to have telehealth attorneys around to define this new field that is telehealth in an effort to make quality healthcare seamlessly available to all.