Cyber-Malpractice: Legal Exposure for Cybermedicine

Abstract

This Article examines the content-related liability exposure of health care providers operating in cyberspace (cybermedicine). The Article maps real space theories of liability such as professional negligence, misrepresentation and products liability to cybermedicine fact patterns. This Article examines cybermedicine in contrast to the more widely discussed but narrower issue of telemedicine. The latter typically refers to technologies, primarily preconvergence telephony, satellite and video, used to patch geographical holes in health coverage. Thus, telemedicine is to medicine what distance learning is to education. Just as telemedicine technologies and goals have been more limited, so too have the legal issues been analyzed in a narrower regulatory or licensure issues.