Legal issues in e-healthcare systems

Abstract

E-healthcare systems through electronic medical records (EMRs), electronic prescribing and decision support systems endeavour to reduce the cost and errors in healthcare, while facilitating easy access to it. Hovever the adoption of e-healthcare systems does not seem to be flourishing as expected due to various barriers. One of such barriers is an inadequate level of legal protection or unawareness of availibility of laws and regulation that addresses the e-healthcare system. The objective of the study of this chapter was to investigate the present status of law relating to privacy, product liability, jurisdiction of courts in e-health care disputes and professional negligence. The study recommends that the existing offline and e-commerce laws should be interpreted to address many e-healthcare concerns even though specific e-healthcare laws are not enacted by many nations