Ethics, Guidelines, Standards, and Policy: What Telemedicine During COVID-19 Tells Us about Broadening the Ethical Scope

Abstract

The coronavirus crisis is causing considerable disruption and anguish. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent explosion of telehealth services also provides an unparalleled opportunity to consider ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) beyond immediate needs. Ethicists, informaticians, and others can learn from experience, and evaluate information technology practices and evidence on which to base policy and standards, identify significant values and issues, and revise ethical guidelines. This paper builds on professional organizations’ guidelines and ELSI scholarship to develop emerging concerns illuminated by current experience. Four ethical areas characterized previous literature: quality of care and the doctor-patient relationship, access, consent, and privacy. More attention is needed to these and to expanding the scope of bioethical analysis to include health information technologies. An applied ethics approach to ELSI would addresses context-specific issues and the relationships between people and technologies, and facilitate effective and ethical institutionalization of telehealth and other health information technologies.

Keywords: telehealth; telemedicine; ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI); ethics; policy; regulation; evaluation; health information technology; informatics; healthcare; law; pandemic; COVID-19