e-health와 의료과오의 제 문제

The term e-health has emerged since the late 1990s to keep up with current global trend. There isn't yet a solid academic foundation for that term nor any brief definition of it. WTO(World Health Organization) defines e-health as a technology to apply a combination of different sorts of ICT to medicine for a clinical, educational or administrative purpose. That corresponds to e-commerce in health and medical industry, and aims at providing medical service as a sort of business whereas telemedicine focuses on selling medical equipment and could consequently be said hardware-centered service. So e-health refers to a paradigm of medical information and technology in multiple forms, which ranges from simple techniques like automated treatment reservation to a wide variety of systems geared toward ensuring patients' information accessibility and to clinical application technology for the sake of assisting medical treatment. Thanks to its benefits, e-health comes into spotlight lately. That makes it unnecessary for patients to visit medical institutions in person or to wait to receive treatment. Even if they have to wait, it won't be any long, and they can have efficient access to medical service night and day without being restricted by time. Furthermore, they can remain anonymous, and regional gap will be eliminated by letting everybody benefit from quality medicine regardless of their dwelling site. Patients can be provided enough information before they make any decision, and all the benefits of e-health predicts its growth potentiality in the future. However, there may be some disadvantages as well. Patients are likely to get into troubles if they don't properly understand or comply with the instructions of doctors. The relationship between doctors and patients might get weaken, and a lack of face-to-face treatment might provoke unfavorable consequences. Moreover, there's no guarantee that information provided is trustworthy. Every medical institution should be linked to ensure the clinical practice of e-health, and their link might engender problems that are related to the civil liability of individuals concerned or couldn't be resolved by administrative regulations. Legal problems might be triggered by treatment without medical examination, invasion of personal medical information, trusting inaccurate online information, medical malpractice or incompetence of medical personnels. There were lots of limits to the past paper-based information due to time and spatial restrictions, but modern people in the 21st century are exposed to new information environments called a cyberspace that has no time and spatial limitations. Under the circumstances, the establishment of a relevant legal system that could respond to such environmental changes is very critical in that it could definitely affect the survival of humans, let alone a maintenance of public order. One way to make it happen seems to enact a special law on e-health.