FDA’s support of AI in telemedicine

Epstein Becker & Green’s Bradley Merrill Thompson describes the agency’s current trajectory for regulation of patient-facing and provider-facing telehealth products that incorporate AI. Many appreciate that telemedicine is more than just using Skype so that a doctor can look a patient in the eyes. For telemedicine to be truly useful, the patient must be able to collect and transmit a variety of data the healthcare professional needs in order to assess the patient’s health. Indeed, state regulators have historically been skeptical of telemedicine precisely because they fear that the doctor-patient relationship in that context is too thin, with doctors being forced to make judgments based on too little available information.