Bridging The Divide: A Techno-Medico-Legal Analysis Of Telemedicine And Virtual Healthcare Regulation In India
Deepikka R S, Junior Research Fellow, Research Scholar, School of Excellence in Law, The Tamil Nadu Dr. Ambedkar Law University, Chennai.
ABSTRACT
The rapid digitisation of healthcare delivery in India, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and institutionalised through the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, has created a regulatory vacuum at the intersection of three traditionally distinct disciplines, namely law, technology and medicine. As Telemedicine and e-health have transformed into an inevitable component of clinical practice, the statutory architecture that governs them still remains fragmented across various laws like the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, various Telemedicine Practise Guidelines and other professional guidelines issued by the state and national medical councils, etc that were never drafted with the interplay between law, technology and healthcare in mind. Innumerable cyber-attacks on the healthcare systems, breach of patient’s data privacy and confidentiality, role of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare systems, evolution of new virtual healthcare devices and practices have exposed the vulnerabilities of the Indian healthcare system that is racing towards digitisation without an optimal legal safety net. This paper undertakes a techno-medico-legal analysis of the Indian regulatory landscape governing telemedicine, e-health and cybersecurity in the healthcare sector. It maps the individual statutory regimes that touch upon law, technology and healthcare, identifies the precise points at which these regimes intersect and, at times, contradict one another, and situates the Indian position within a comparative framework alongside the United States and the United Kingdom. The paper concludes with a set of concrete legislative and institutional recommendations and argues that interdisciplinary research on techno- medico-legal scholarship is no longer an academic luxury but a basic necessity for safeguarding the health data and physical wellbeing of Indian citizens.
Keywords: Telemedicine; E-Health; Virtual Healthcare; Health Data; Cybercrime; Techno-medico-legal.
