eHealth

Despite plenty of resistance the field of medicine is getting more and more caught by digitisation.

The corona-crisis is even advancing this trend. Patients, but also doctors can inform thesmelves on the internet about medical issues. Telediagnosis and other forms of telehealth are becoming more relevant. Recently prescribing medical software applications became allowed and digital patient records are getting used more often by doctors. In theory it is discussed about new possibilities to use virtual reality and even tele-robots in the nearest future. An important new factor is the usage of artificial intelligence. To train them there is a need of an infinite amount of data, that is not available in europe. The result is the threat of new dependencies from not-european major corporations.

It is obvious that these developments contain special ethical and legal challenges: How can we ensure the quality of medical propositions that are circulating on the internet? Who is liable for damages that are occuring as a result of deflective software applications? Is there an accountability that secures medical facilities against vulnerability to sabotage? How does data protection work when the patients records are not stored in file cabinets anymore but in the cloud? Is there a need to reform the liability of providers?