In line with the National Health Board’s recommendations for health care providers to prioritize alternative channels to facilitate access to doctors for consultations and to decongest assistance centers, Parliament has just approved a law providing a legal framework for telemedicine – which until now did not have specific regulations.

This opens up opportunities for the e-health industry and is also in line with the need for new forms of health care made patent by the COVID-19 pandemic, which also led to the government’s launching the “coronavirus.uy” app.

Principles supporting it: 

  • Universality – guarantees better access to health care for the entire population.
  • Equity – makes it possible to eliminate geographic barriers, bringing services to the population in remote places and with scant resources.
  • Quality of service – promotes improved quality and comprehensive care for patients, strengthening the capacities of health care personnel.
  • Efficiency – reduces health costs by optimizing assistance resources, improving demand management, shortening hospital stays, and decreasing repetition of medical acts and displacements of health care workers.
  • Decentralization – optimizes attention at health care services, enhancing the process of decentralization of the Comprehensive National Health Care System.
  • Complementarity – complements the assistance provided by the attending physician.
  • Confidentiality – emphasizes confidentiality in the physician-patient relationship, guarantying security in the exchange of information between practitioners or health centers. 

Patient consent: 

Patients must give express consent for treatments, procedures, diagnostics, as well as for transmission and exchange of information from their clinical history. A patient can revoke this consent at any time. 

A recent Resolution by the Personal Data Regulatory and Control Unit provides that treatment of health data directly related to the COVID-19 health emergency can be performed at any time.  This, naturally, does not preclude compliance with other data protection principles like veracity, purpose, security and proactive responsibility.

Sensitive data: 

All information transmitted and stored using telemedicine will be considered sensitive for purposes of the personal data protection law, and the appropriate security and confidentiality measures must be put in place.  

Regulation: 

The bill of law authorizes the Ministry of Health to issue action protocols within 90 days of passage of the law.