University of Washington Telemedicine is increasingly hailed as a means by which the limited resources in our struggling health care system can be economically stretched to provide better, more timely, access to health care. The ever-greater capacity for electronic interaction presents risk as well as benefit for both patients and physicians. One significant downside of telemedicine is the alteration, perhaps even ablation, of the personal interaction between doctor and patient. This brief article will focus on how this changing face of the physician-patient interaction in telemedicine is likely to blur and alter the traditional concept of duty and complicate analysis of this element in traditional malpractice negligence actions. Telemedicine allows patients to electronically connect with ever more information and access a greater variety and larger universe of providers.
Telecommunications also facilitate collaborative consultation between providers.
In the traditional malpractice case, the alleged negligence occurs firmly within the temporal boundaries of an episode of care delivered by an identified physician. Specialty consultations occur in a sequential pattern, each occupying a distinct quantum of patient and provider time. However, in a telemedicine intervention, the temporal boundaries are more fluid. Thus, telemedicine presents the opportunity for the courts to recast the provider-patient relationship, and the duty that flows from it, in a more elastic fashion. It is likely that the courts will turn to two lines of cases involving nuances of the provider-patient relationship in order to accommodate the challenges raised by telemedicine.