Telehealth, meaning “healing from a distance”, has turned into an indispensable online service during the pandemic as it prevented contagion between patients and healthcare professionals.

Even though face-to-face consultation between the patient and the physician remains the gold standard as far as clinical care is concerned, telehealth is being increasingly practiced year after year.

As a result,the rapidly growing number of medical disciplines and telehealth platforms        led to several ethical and legal issues being raised relating to the practice of these services, which by and large have still remained unsolved and require adequate federal regulatory scrutiny.

Concerns proliferate for telehealth giant Cerebral

Cerebral treats people for conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression and is one of the fastest growing mental healthcare platforms in the world, but now faces controversies with regards to some of its business practices.

At the end of April 2022, a lawsuit was filed in the California State court by a former vice president of product and engineering alleging that Cerebral intended to increase customer retention by prescribing stimulants to all its ADHD patients, thereby putting profits and growth ahead of patient safety.

A Wall Street Journal report voiced concerns that clinicians working in Cerebral felt pressured to prescribe stimulants, such as Adderall and Xanax for ADHD, even though their thirty minutes of patient’s evaluation was grossly inadequate to properly diagnose the ailment.

Further, the company unintentionally shared sensitive data, including mental health assessments of millions of its patients with advertisers and social media giants like Google,Tik Tok and Facebook according to a report issued by Cerebral Inc.

Cerebral, by way of a March 9 letter, has admitted that it wrongly shared data of 3.1 million users and have notified this fact to them. The breach of data stemmed from the company’s use of pixel tracking technology, which Cerebral says has been either discontinued or reconfigured.

Cerebral further stated that it had since discontinued sharing of data with any third party which did not meet HIPAA requirements. At the same time they claimed that they have enhanced their information and technology vetting practices.

A list of lapses reported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has cited the Cerebral data leak as the second largest breach of health information in 2023.

Therapy apps face new questions about data collection

In spite of being touted as a wonderful alternative to a broken healthcare system, the telehealth industry has a dark side as well.

A flurry of findings in the past year have revealed that some other recognisable names in industry have engaged in creepy and harmful data sharing and see people in dire need of help as fodder for making money, rather than as a patient.

For example ,BetterHelp, considered to be a poster child of online therapy, was fined $7.8 million for mishandling the data of their users. Further the Federal Trade Commission(FTC) has alleged that the company pushed people repeatedly to fill up questionnaires to share sensitive health information, thereby breaking its own privacy promises.

The commission further added that despite BetterHelp assuring users that their data won’t be shared, except for limited purposes like counseling services, it handed over the sensitive information to Facebook to run advertisements for BetterHelp.

BetterHelp has since offered to settle the amount,but has denied any wrongdoing, by defending its policy as “industry standard”.

Another telehealth giant, Talkspace, has come under scrutiny from the psychiatric community. Letters to executives of Talkspace called on the online mental health company to explain how the patients data collected through their app was being used and its relationship with online advertisers and social media platforms such as Facebook,Google etc.

With these new findings,companies like BetterHelp and Talkspace will now have even more to answer for. The FTC, on its part, is all set to provide a stout reminder that defending the sensitive data of its citizens from illegal exploitation will be its number one priority.

The case for future online mental health

In the future, the range of telemedicine is expected to expand by connecting patients with providers internationally as providers will look to cross global boundaries,while also highlighting the weaknesses in the system.

Online mental health care is an attractive proposition as it allows those in need immediate access for seeking support from the privacy and comfort of one’s private space.

Even more importantly,it offers radically better access as compared to a session in a traditional brick-and-mortar clinic, which is not only expensive,but time consuming.

However, telehealth usage will come with significant ethical, economic and importantly regulatory barriers which will need to be addressed approximately.

Key strategies:

• Online therapy apps must seek informed consent from their clients prior to each tele-consultation,and that too in a specific format
• Depending on the state, telehealth practice will come under the purview of law which may impose strict data policy for patient safety.
• The rollout of 5G services worldwide make telehealth easier due to very high data transfer speeds.
• What data will be collected and shared and how it will be protected throughout the patient’s recovery journey.

Best practices to secure privacy when using telehealth

The success of telehealth was followed by a number of policies to guarantee the safeguarding of a patient’s information over the internet.

Safe delivery of medical information through telehealth assures the patient that their private data is safe and secure. Follow the steps below on every telehealth visit:

• Read professional reviews from industry experts such as Bestonlinetherapy.com
• Verify a HIPAA compliant environment in a location where no one can hear the discussion between the caregiver and the patient.
• Confirm secure internet access by avoiding public Wifi and crowded places.
• Healthcare professionals should ensure that the files containing the user’s healthcare information are password protected.
• The user face should be easy to use to limit navigation issues that will reduce the risk of security breaches.
• Use two-factor authentication to verify those accessing the information are from within the organization.

Discuss what this means to the future of virtual health care as a whole. How consumers can project themselves from predatory services or privacy violations.