The Ethics of Telemedicine

Improvement in telecommunication technology, the widespread access to this technology across all socioeconomic categories, and the need to leverage health care provider access has resulted in telemedicine's rapid growth.1'3 This is particularly true for orthopedic surgery. [...]telemedicine will play an increasingly important role in our profession. The purpose of this report is to examine these issues using the ethical and legal principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and primacy of patient interest in order to gain a better understanding of how telemedicine can be used to provide care within the ethical and legal boundaries of medicine. Mill opined that individual rights to happiness may be limited when it is for the good of society.5 Clearly, allowing patients unfettered access to providers when doing so would endanger those providers and other patients, would harm society. [...]we are well within ethical bounds to insist that patients who pose a risk to others by horizontal disease transmission seek routine medical care via telemedicine.