Abstract
Remote medicine is developing more and more rapidly in the practice of Czech healthcare. Nevertheless, from the legal perspective, it is situated in a rather gray zone, where a number of key questions are not clarified, even though the issue in question is slowly beginning to receive the attention of the legislator and the wider legal public.
The legally safe practice of telemedicine consists in consultations provided by a health services provider to a patient who is already in their care. Standard care at an appropriate professional level should not differ much from the care provided in physical contact with the patient. A specific standard of care will be gradually defined in the context of telemedicine through guidelines and other relevant documents, which will increasingly be created by the medical profession itself.
Personal data protection is mainly based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Health data and other sensitive data represent a particularly protected category of data that can only be processed with the express consent of the patient or (under certain conditions) for the purposes set out in the GDPR.
An important problem for the introduction of telemedicine into clinical practice is posed by the overly restrictive mechanisms of reimbursements from the public health insurance system, where only basic consultations and some other selected services are covered.