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Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital healthcare has gained an influx of interest and global investment. The WHO has published guidelines and recommendations for countries to successfully implement telemedicine on a large, nationwide scale. This is not only helpful for patients who wish to p...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Jain, Dipika
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10048681/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36981568
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060911
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author Jain, Dipika
author_facet Jain, Dipika
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description In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital healthcare has gained an influx of interest and global investment. The WHO has published guidelines and recommendations for countries to successfully implement telemedicine on a large, nationwide scale. This is not only helpful for patients who wish to protect themselves from COVID-19 and related illnesses that they may be vulnerable to, but it also has great potential to increase access to healthcare. In India, a country without universal healthcare grappling with a high level of distrust in the public health system, there are several implementation challenges for digital healthcare across the country. The current laws in India that regulate technology do not explicitly address telehealth, nor are there adequate data protection laws in place that could manage the significant amount of data that would be generated by digital healthcare if applied on a large scale. Further, there are concerns at the level of patient privacy, which could be compromised through digital healthcare. In addition to the legal concerns surrounding privacy, there is no framework in place to ensure informed consent in a digital healthcare context. In this paper, I analyze the legal, structural, and ethical concerns around digital health and provide an understanding of the problems these shortcomings pose, as well as policy recommendations for overcoming these problems.
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spelling pubmed-100486812023-03-29 Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges Jain, Dipika Healthcare (Basel) Article In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital healthcare has gained an influx of interest and global investment. The WHO has published guidelines and recommendations for countries to successfully implement telemedicine on a large, nationwide scale. This is not only helpful for patients who wish to protect themselves from COVID-19 and related illnesses that they may be vulnerable to, but it also has great potential to increase access to healthcare. In India, a country without universal healthcare grappling with a high level of distrust in the public health system, there are several implementation challenges for digital healthcare across the country. The current laws in India that regulate technology do not explicitly address telehealth, nor are there adequate data protection laws in place that could manage the significant amount of data that would be generated by digital healthcare if applied on a large scale. Further, there are concerns at the level of patient privacy, which could be compromised through digital healthcare. In addition to the legal concerns surrounding privacy, there is no framework in place to ensure informed consent in a digital healthcare context. In this paper, I analyze the legal, structural, and ethical concerns around digital health and provide an understanding of the problems these shortcomings pose, as well as policy recommendations for overcoming these problems. MDPI 2023-03-21 /pmc/articles/PMC10048681/ /pubmed/36981568 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060911 Text en © 2023 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Jain, Dipika
Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges
title Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges
title_full Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges
title_fullStr Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges
title_full_unstemmed Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges
title_short Regulation of Digital Healthcare in India: Ethical and Legal Challenges
title_sort regulation of digital healthcare in india: ethical and legal challenges
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10048681/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36981568
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060911
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