The legal and ethical aspects of telemedicine

Abstract

The medical challenge presented by telemedicine is for doctors to find satisfactory ways of doing their jobs from a distance. The legal and ethical challenge presented by telemedicine is to ensure that the very highest standards are met from the outset. This can be achieved only by the legal and medical professions learning to combine their expertise, rather than by the former adopting the adversarial stance that has come to punctuate its relationship with the latter in recent years.