Digital Remote Transactions in Medicine: Legal Barriers and Perspectives

Nowadays, digital remote transactions in medical services are becoming more common. They include remote medical consultations, monitoring of physiological body parameters, diagnostical and therapeutical manipulations, exchange of examination results, remote medical conferences, councils, seminars, and lectures—summarized under the umbrella term “telemedicine”. Their active development is facilitated by technological advancements and growing public demand for telemedicine services. Unfortunately, full-scale implementation of telemedicine is constrained by numerous legal limitations. One of the ways to overcome such barriers is to implement experimental legal regimes (regulatory sandboxes) in the sphere of digital innovations and temporarily suspend current legal provisions. The methodology of this study comprises systemic and structural analysis, formal logic, legal comparison, forecasting, and interpretation. Special attention is given to the legal experiment method, as present-day digital interactions related to medical services have been developing in Russia mainly within the framework of regulatory sandboxes (experimental legal regimes). This study analyzes the theoretical aspects and current status of telemedicine (based on modern medical and legal academic resources), describes legal constraints to its developments, outlines the prospects of regulatory sandbox projects, and estimates the problems and opportunities of telemedicine technologies in Russia.