Ethical Issues in Telehealth — Communication and its Challenges
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (I know enough has been written about its impacts, but I’m going to write a bit more), basic tasks that we were so accustomed to doing in person have been completely flipped in order to adapt to this new fully-online society. Sure, technology has woven its way into our daily lives, but we never imagined that so quickly would it replace trips to the grocery store, meetings with friends, and visits to the doctor.
In this new era that has undoubtedly uprooted the basic person-to-person contact, different ways of continuing services online are being utilized. One of these services is telehealth, the idea of having doctor visits and health information shared fully remotely. Although this seems like the future coming to life in the present day, there can be many ethical issues and challenges for addressing them if rules are not set in place.
HIPAA guidelines and other normal standards were created originally for in-person care, so it can be difficult to transition these requirements to the internet. Most families are still in quarantine, making it hard to have privacy for online checkups and therapy sessions. The HIPAA Privacy Rule is meant to ensure that individuals’ medical histories are not shared with others, but multiple people living and breathing in the same place at all times of the day poses an issue to this legal right.
Being used to in-person visits, many patients feel uncomfortable with online care and do not believe it to be as effective or worth the same cost. There is a large concern about telehealth being an unreasonable method of alleviating medical issues. This is a valid point, because a doctor staring at an injury through an iPad screen cannot diagnose the problem with the same guarantee as if they were looking at the injury in person. This is where regulations about what can and cannot be diagnosed electronically need to be created and constantly monitored.
As life transitions online more and more each day, it becomes crucial that we do not lose sight of the expectations that have been set for our health care, while learning to navigate the challenges of a world amidst a pandemic. Telehealth is the obvious next step in the movement to an almost fully online society, both for the time being and eventually for the future, which makes it important to treat this field with the utmost ethical responsibility.
