What do playing Monopoly, driving a car, and baking cupcakes have in common? They all have rules to be followed. Generally, rules aim to ensure fairness, protect from harm, and instruct on how best to do something.
As a regulatory body, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) maintains a set of rules, in the form of policies, to guide physicians on how best to provide patient care. The CPSO revises these polices from time to time, with input from key stakeholders. This past July and August, the CPSO held a public consultation on draft revisions to its Telemedicine policy.
Given our extensive expertise in telemedicine, OTN submitted a response to this where we proposed changes to the Telemedicine policy that will help to ensure fairness, to protect patients from harm, and to instruct physicians on how best to optimize the use of telemedicine in their practice.
Most significantly, we suggested that the Telemedicine policy require physicians to use telemedicine when it is in their patient’s best interest to do so. Not only is telemedicine technology widely available across the province, providing care virtually can improve access to care, and decrease the overall risks to the patient, depending on the patient’s circumstances. More information on the use and benefit of telemedicine in a variety of clinical contexts is available through OTN’s Publication Repository, a curated collection of peer-reviewed journal articles. Additionally, OTN’s Training Centre contains various types of short instructional videos, quick reference guides, and clinical protocols, available to all health care providers.
Also included in our response, we suggested that the expectations regarding privacy and confidentiality should be more practical and feasible for physicians than what is currently proposed in the revisions. Technological privacy and security is a complex area that requires specific expertise beyond the reasonable scope of practice of a physician. Instead, the policy should allow and encourage physicians to transfer some of their privacy and security responsibility to their technology provider, through a contractual agreement.
You can read our full response, along with the draft policy and the responses of others, on the CPSO website. The CPSO has now closed the consultation for comments, but we’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.
Do you think the policy covers what it should? Do you agree with our recommendations? Is there anything that has been overlooked?
