Laws governing medical malpractice address professional negligence through act or omission by a health-care provider, in which the treatment provided falls below the accepted standard of practice in the medical community and causes harm to the patient. By and large, these laws were enacted with traditional medicine in mind. Consequently, malpractice involving medical error is evaluated by standards and regulations related to traditional medicine. The risk of applying traditional standards to e-health transactions is both finding medical malpractice when none exists and failure to find medical malpractice when appropriate.
Generally, e-health is the application of medicine via the Internet. The Internet, as defined by the United States Supreme Court, is an international network of interconnected computers. See Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997). Thus, combining this definition with the practice of medicine, suggests that e-health, and hence e-malpractice, would cover medical professional errors related to any health services and information delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies.
