Creating a cyber doctor-patient relationship

As patients turn to the Internet to find health information, some are finding physician Web sites that provide more than just information. Some sites offer services that were once only available during a face-to-face encounter between patient and doctor. At what point does providing medical information constitute a physician-patient relationship?

Reply:

The World Wide Web is cluttered with medical sites. It has been estimated that a quarter of the Internet is now devoted to some aspect of health care.

There are an increasing number of sites sponsored by physicians which provide information on virtually every medical condition. Usually these physician sites are often described as being of two primary types: sites that offer generic medical and health information or the sites that provide varying degrees of advice.

Both types of physician sites, informational and advisory, present opportunities and problems and push patient-physician relations into largely uncharted territory.

The use of the Web by physicians to provide medical information and advice is hardly the environment in which legal and ethical standards in medicine evolved. Yet in considering the implications of Web-based interactions on the patient-physician relationship, we are dealing with an arrangement that lies at the heart of both medical law and ethics. [...]