Abstract
In recent years, telemedicine has been increasingly discussed in the professional discourse on health care. Yet there remain many unanswered critical questions including its definition and classification, legal liability for malpractice, or the application of concepts such as the standard of care or informed consent.
In the Czech Republic, telemedicine has only recently started to be introduced into law, with only a limited scope of telemedical services being legally safe to perform for providers that do not have the patient in their "physical" care. The approach to telemedicine varies among jurisdictions, from very permissive Sweden to rather conservative stance to the standard of care took by, for example, some of the professional associations in the USA.
In this paper, we analyse four articles of the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine that apply directly to the practice of telemedicine, setting broad rules for the equitable access to health care, standard of care, informed consent, and compensation for harm. In order to improve - or at least preserve - the equitable accessibility of quality health care, it is necessary to allow reasonable modifications of the standard of care so that in the assessment of permissibility of the use of telemedicine in particular cases, certain disadvantages of telemedicine might be outweighed by its benefits.
Patients need to be informed about the remote nature of proposed medical services when this information is able to rationally alter their decision regarding their informed consent. There is no need to alter the system of legal liability for medical malpractice in telemedicine, its current principles being sufficient to enable patients achieve fair compensation.