This story illustrates the complexities of designing modern technology to augment human interaction. It's not enough that it works; potential use cases and their consequences must be considered, and guidelines established to avoid harm #techethics #ethics mercurynews.com/2019/03/08/fre…

Telemedicine is a challenging subject exposing many of the #ethics, social, and technology issues we're going to be facing in the near future.

The hospital my parents worked at explored telemedicine over video link in the mid-1990s. The problem they we're designing for was how to provide access to expert and specialist treatment in remote areas without having to physically ship a doctor, often by helicopter.

Telemedicine enables access and direct interaction in situations where a proxy or non-expert proxy would otherwise have to be used. However, the technology introduces significant limitations and new challenges as this story shows.

What stands out to me in the story is the description by the patient family of being talked to by a "robot". This shows a fundamental failure in service design and the use of the device.

Telemedicine is already in use, and will become ever more prevalent in our lives. The Doctor-in-an-App with live video link is in our very near future. What we need to figure out is how to make this technological shift compassionate and patient-centered.

What are appropriate uses for telemedicine? What are appropriate contexts for this technology, and/or how can we augment the context to make more contexts appropriate?

How do we prevent telemedicine from becoming a crutch for for-profit health care providers and cost-cutting governments to abstract medical Care by removing in-person interactions? H

How do we prevent telemedicine from becoming a vehicle for two-tier medical service: rich people get to speak to humans, poor people get an app and a person on a screen.

Telemedicine has the potential to bring better service to underserved populations and emergency situations, but it also introduces new risks and challenges. Getting it right will require all of is getting together and putting focus on patient and ethics first.