Speciality Insurance blog points out that while remote medical practice can bring efficiency and cost savings (to which I would add better quality medical care to remote locations), it can increase liability. Malpractice insurance is merely the first step in risk management for telemedicine, since local laws may be different on each end of the link. And not only local laws, but local expectations, so you need to make sure all participants have appropriate expectations and monitor both those expectations and what actually happens.

Hm, I wonder if there might also be liability issues for the network providers.

There are also competitiveness issues here; reasonably fast links are necessary to do some types of telemedicine, such as doctors doing remote consultations for which they need large, high resolution, and low latency two-way video connections. ISPs that can provide that should have a competitive advantage over ones that can’t. Countries that have such fast links widely available for reasonable prices might end up having more healthy populations, which in turn would translate to greater economic competitiveness.

-jsq