Telemedicine and Online Health: Legal & Regulatory Pathways to Future Medicine

Telemedicine is the medicine of the future. We’re moving from brick and mortar to virtual practice. We’re moving from the old world, which is going to the family doctor that would make house calls, to the world where people go into a space to see physicians and get treatment, to a world where you have to go no further than your own phone or your own monitor. And you’ll be able to access health care from anywhere in the world.

We’re going from telemedicine anywhere to telemedicine everywhere. It’s becoming ubiquitous. Now as we do this, there is some very specific legal challenges that telemedicine companies need to surmount. There are issues of privacy and confidentiality. On a federal US level, we have HIPAA for example. You have to be HIPAA compliant if you’ve got a telemedicine product. There are FDA issues of regulation of medical devices. And there are state law issues about regulating practitioners, because licensure is governed by state law. And when a practitioner engages in telemedicine, they’re governed by the law of the state where the patient is located, where that practitioner may not be licensed.

So in order to bring a product to market, you’ve got to surmount these regulatory obstacles, in a very strategic way. However, once we do this, we are able to bring something that’s going to benefit millions of people. It’s going to transform medicine from that one on one encounter in physical space, to an encounter that can happen in the Cloud or virtual reality, and be tremendously beneficial. So people can get the cure they need anywhere, on demand. That’s where medicine is going in the future.