Authors (including presenting author) :
Au WK
Affiliation :
LLM (Medical ethics and law) Student, HKU
Introduction :
In the past, telemedicine was neglected due to the high accessibility to healthcare services. Nonetheless, the COVID-19 has provided the catalyst for the expansion, which can help minimize the exposure risks of visits.
While I was serving in the Department of FM&PHC, HKWC, they had introduced telehealth and telemedicine in part of their services. All of which were conducted by the synchronous method. Given COVID-19, it may be the right time to expand the use of telemedicine.
Objectives :
This paper is to consolidate legal and ethical concerns in telemedicine, and with an intention to raise awareness among stakeholders about the risks of telemedicine systems, particularly, privacy and confidentiality. It is expected this observation study to come up with ideas and tackle blind spots on drafting practical recommendations.
Methodology :
Scoping searches were performed using HKUL, PubMed and BMJ by using keywords, including “Telemedicine,” “Privacy,” “Confidentiality,” “Telemedicine and ethics”, and Telemedicine and legal,”. Different types of articles were analysed, encompassing research articles, review articles, quantitative and qualitative studies within 25 years.
Result & Outcome :
Results:
From 20 articles published (i.e., pilot studies, literature review, ethical guidelines, etc.), main legal and ethical aspects, such as data protection, data transmission, confidentiality and privacy, were considered.
Conclusions:
Telemedicine was sluggish last year. One of the reasons was the elderly did not own smartphones. In the USA, 60% of the old did not possess smartphones[1]. Here, I made a well-educated guess and inferred that a great number of Hongkongers aged above 65 were with no smartphone[2-4]. The problem would be solved after NGOs distributed smartphones to the needy[2].
To advance the telemedicine system, providers shall have paid attention to the privacy of remote clinical care delivery, especially, they shall have reminded patients to aware of who would be viewing this information and of the context during teleconsultation[5].
About data transmission, encryption or identification techniques, like, face recognition would be one way to avert hackers[6, 7]. Inevitably, facing recognition was merely available to high-end smartphones but fingerprint would be the last resort.
Last but not least, ethical guidelines might not be the most appropriate approach to protect privacy, the government shall have considered reforming Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap 486), as this had been done by the USA[8] and the EU[9,10].
(10 references were referred.)
