On Tech Ethics Podcast – Navigating Telehealth Ethics

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1. Episode Introduction and Ethical Context (00:03) The host introduces the podcast, welcomes Kathy Wibberly, and sets the stage for a discussion of key ethical issues in telehealth, including informed consent, standards and quality of care, professionalism, trust, equity, and access.
2. Kathy Wibberly’s Background and Entry into Telehealth (01:11) Kathy shares her professional journey, early public-health work, and how her career evolved alongside telehealth’s expansion.
3. Defining the Ethical Landscape of Telehealth (03:34) The conversation addresses telehealth’s rapidly evolving ecosystem and the need to preserve person-centered, high-quality care amid technological change.
4. Informed Consent in Virtual Care (04:36) Discussion focuses on how informed consent in telehealth must address technology, privacy, limitations, and patient understanding beyond clinical issues alone.
5. Best Practices for Consent, Privacy, and Transparency (05:30) Kathy outlines practical consent practices, including state-specific requirements, privacy protections, and clear communication about technology use.
6. Emerging Technologies and Transparency Expectations (07:17) The discussion expands to transparency around AI tools, documentation support, who is present during visits, and patients’ ability to opt out.
7. Maintaining Standards and Quality of Care in Telehealth (08:32) The episode examines how standards of care apply in virtual settings, emphasizing equivalence to in-person care and the role of clinical judgment.
8. Provider Competency and Appropriate Use of Telehealth (12:04) Kathy highlights the importance of clinician training, adapting workflows, and recognizing when telehealth is or is not the right care modality.
9. AI in Telehealth: Opportunities and Cautions (13:30) The role of AI in telehealth is discussed, including potential benefits, limitations, bias concerns, and the need for human oversight.
10. Professionalism, Boundaries, and Virtual Care Etiquette (17:45) The conversation addresses professionalism in virtual environments, including communication norms, privacy, and boundary management when care enters the home.
11. Verification, Trust, and Privacy in Virtual Encounters (22:30) The importance of identity verification, trust-building, and privacy safeguards is explored for both video-based and audio-only telehealth visits.
12. Equity, Access, and the Digital Divide (27:27) The episode examines how telehealth affects equity, discussing digital literacy, connectivity challenges, and community-based access solutions.
13. Closing Reflections, Credits, and Acknowledgments (34:54) The host offers final reflections on ethical telehealth practice, thanks the production team, and concludes the episode.

Daniel Smith: Welcome to On Tech Ethics with CITI Program. Today, I’m going to speak with Kathy Wibberly, who is the director of the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center, which is one of the 14 federally funded telehealth resource centers working to expand access to quality care through telehealth solutions for community spacing the greatest barriers to optimal health outcomes. Kathy also serves as the director of research at the University of Virginia’s Center for Telehealth.

In our conversation, we’re going to discuss the ethical challenges that telehealth providers must consider, including informed consent, standards and quality of care, professionalism and virtual care, verification and trust, and equity and access.

Before we get started, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not designed to provide legal advice or legal guidance. You should consult with your organization’s attorneys if you have questions or concerns about the relevant laws and regulations that may be discussed in this podcast. In addition, the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests. And on that note, welcome to the podcast, Kathy.

Kathy Wibberly: Thank you so much for having me.

Daniel Smith: It’s great to have you. So, I gave you a very brief introduction, but can you expand on that a bit and tell us more about your professional background and what led you to focus on telehealth?

Kathy Wibberly: Sure. So, my professional path has been a little bit unconventional when it comes to healthcare, but in many ways it set me up perfectly for the work I do now. So, I’m a counseling psychologist by training. I completed my PhD. But right after I finished that, I went straight into public health, working at the State Health Department in Virginia within health policy. And that’s where kind of my world opened up to telehealth. And this will definitely date me, but I came into telehealth during the era of the national bioterrorism concerns. I was asked to serve on the Southern Governor’s Association Task Force to explore how telehealth could support emergency preparedness and response if we ever faced a bioterrorism attack. So, one of my first assignments was simply to map out what telehealth activity existed in Virginia. And at that time, outside of UVA, VCU, and maybe a handful of very innovative health centers, there really wasn’t much.

And so as I began convening stakeholders, learning what was happening, and participating in these multi-site emergency preparedness scenarios, I really became fascinated by telehealth potential, not just for crisis response, but for everyday access to care.

So that interest deepened as I moved into a role of director of the State Office of Rural Health here in Virginia. And in that capacity, I wrote and managed several grants to bring telehealth services to rural Virginia and to underserved communities in general. And so fast-forward several years, when the University of Virginia received the HRSA grant to establish the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center, I was recruited to lead it. And here I am, about 14 years later, still energized by how telehealth continues to evolve and how it’s reshaping access to care across Virginia and across the country and the world, really. So, it’s been a pretty interesting journey.

Daniel Smith: Given your extensive background and experience with telehealth, from your perspective, what are the, from a high level, the biggest ethical challenges that telehealth providers must consider?

Kathy Wibberly: I think telehealth has opened up remarkable doors for access. But at the same time, it brings a digital version ecosystem that has risks, responsibilities, and expectations. And I think one of the challenges is that ecosystem evolves very quickly. You have new technologies emerging all the time, things like AI that become part of care delivery.

So I think at its core, the ethics of telehealth are about preserving the fundamentals of high quality care grounded in professional integrity. But even as the environment shifts, it means delivering care that is safe, trustworthy, person-centered, well-coordinated, equitable, accessible to those who need it. So in other words, like the kind of care we’d want for ourselves and our own family members, something we don’t always achieve consistently, whether in-person or virtually, but I think that’s really at the root of what ethics is in healthcare in general, and then you just add the technology dimension to it.

Daniel Smith: Absolutely. So you mentioned the term person-centered, so that makes me think of informed consent. So, can you talk some more about how obtaining informed consent differs in telehealth compared to in-person care? And then also, what best practices help ensure patients truly understand what they’re agreeing to?

Kathy Wibberly: Yeah. So, informed consent and telehealth, I guess, isn’t dramatically different from in-person care when you’re getting consent for just general healthcare, but the emphasis does shift a little. So, when you’re in a virtual environment, patients need to understand not only the clinical aspects of their care, but also the technological dimension. So, how does this visit work? What are its limitations? How is their information going to be protected? What happens if the technology fails? So, the consent conversation really becomes a bit broader and more intentional related to technology.

So, some of the best practices I would say starts with the provider. Actually, understanding and knowing the consent requirements for their state, which often differs. So laws, regulations, and professional standards, that doesn’t differ, but the laws and regulations oftentimes differ by state. And in some case, payers have rules around consent practices.

So, most telehealth consent processes begin with a clear explanation of what telehealth involves, the potential risks and benefits, and a straightforward discussion of privacy and security. Patients also need to understand that certain services or activities may not be suitable for telehealth, based on state rules or provider training and competency, or just clinical judgment. And so part of the best practices that we teach are the provider really needs to make sure that the patient understands that what they’re getting is quality healthcare services used and aided by technology as a tool, but that technology can fail sometimes. So the camera might not work. Whatever those technology glitches might be, the internet could go down.

And so the consent really is understanding that their healthcare, I guess, visit, may not happen if some of those glitches occur, and to really understand what the next step is if some of those things happen, they also need to understand how their privacy is being protected. We always say when we train providers that to say, “I am not going to record this conversation, and I expect that you will not be recording as well,” because that protects both the provider and the patient in terms of privacy.

We also teach about disclosing who’s in the room. So we ask the provider to say, “Well, I have a scribe in my room that’s listening to our conversation. They’re going to be taking notes for me. ” And then to ask the patient to disclose who’s in their room, who can hear this conversation, and to document all that information. So, those are some things related to consent.

Now that we have new tools like AI scribes and that are entering the clinical workflow, I think transparency is even more important about who is hearing and listening into this conversation. So, patients should understand when AI is being used, what it does and doesn’t do, what the data touches, what they can ask questions about, and to let them know that they can opt out.

So I guess in short, informed consent for telehealth is still about supporting patient autonomy, their right to choose, or not choose how their healthcare is received, but it requires us to think beyond just the clinical encounter to include that digital environment, the operational logistics. If things fail, who’s going to call whom? How are we going to continue this appointment? And then really helping patients understand the presence of emerging technologies as they come about.

Daniel Smith: Those are all really important considerations, and I think you laid them out nicely. Another thing that you mentioned initially and has kind of been a common theme throughout this conversation is just maintaining standards and quality of care in telehealth settings. So, what does maintaining high standards of care look like in a virtual environment? And what risks do organizations need to watch out for?

Kathy Wibberly: Yeah. So, I think when we talk about quality in a virtual environment, the first principle is that the standard of care shouldn’t change just because the modality changes. So when you talk to a malpractice lawyer, in malpractice law, the standard of care for healthcare is defined as the type and level of care that an ordinary prudent clinician with similar training would provide under similar circumstances in the same community. So what that really tells you is that the standard of care is always contextual, and now telehealth is simply part of those similar circumstances. So, has that provider been trained? Are they in a rural community where broadband is not ubiquitous and spotty at best? Are they in an environment where broadband is ubiquitous and you have high speed? Because I think that standard of care sometimes will fluctuate depending on what type of community you’re in, what kind of context you’re in.

So, kind of what’s interesting is that when we talk about telehealth, people often hold telehealth to a much higher bar than in-person care. In-person care is highly variable. Two clinicians, you can visit one clinician and you could have a very different visit than a different clinician, even within the same community, much less in a different community. And so we rarely scrutinize that brick and mortar care with the same intensity that we do with telehealth. And so I think for telehealth, we tend to ask questions we almost never ask in in-person care. We say, “Is it evidence-based? Is it equivalent? Does it work in every scenario?” But we don’t apply that same rigor to traditional in-person care. And part of me says, why not? Because we really should be. So I think for me, maintaining high standards virtually means that using the same clinical judgment you would use in-person, while accounting for the realities of poor bandwidth, or a bad camera, or someone holding a very poor quality phone, and not holding it still, I just encourage organizations and providers to really step back and ask a few questions.

So one is, does it work? And we know that for the vast majority of clinical encounters, telehealth works, and that the evidence is there to say that it works. Is it equivalent or better to in-person care? For the most part, research is showing, yes, it is equivalent, and sometimes even better. But in many communities, it’s a realistic question to say, is it better than no care at all? So, if I am working with a rural patient who has to drive two hours to care, and their alternative, if they don’t get telehealth, is to get no care, sometimes I have to say in my own mind, “Well, even telephone care is better than no care.” Or, “Even a really shaky camera that is jittering and has packet loss and I can’t really see them fully is still better than no care.” So, I think we really need to think through whether telehealth is the only viable pathway to timely services, and is that better.

So I think that those are all the contextual things that we need to think about in terms of standard of care. But one thing that we don’t think about often is clinician competency. When we think about training in telehealth, we assume that clinicians are trained in that, just like we don’t ask a clinician when we walk into the office, “Have you learned how to use that stethoscope?” Because the stethoscope is by nature a tool that we expect them to know. And I think we have that same expectation for clinicians in the telehealth world nowadays, especially after the pandemic, but it’s not necessarily true. Many clinicians pivoted to telehealth during the pandemic. They never really received best practices training, they kind of learned trial by fire. And so I think it’s not a bad thing to ask, “Have you actually been trained to do telehealth? How confident are you in the telehealth modality? Do they know how to adapt assessments and workflows and communication styles to a screen?”

And finally, I think we also need to ask, is telehealth the right tool for this specific clinical situation? Because not every encounter is appropriate for virtual care. So I think you asked about risks. The real risks emerge when telehealth is treated as a one-size-fits-all solution when it’s used without evidence, or without adequate training, or without recognizing its limitations. And I’ll just give you an example. So my field is in mental health. And so a mental health provider working with, let’s say, a court-mandated adolescent who’s not really happy to be there. I mean, the research tells us and the evidence tells us that telehealth can be highly effective for teenagers and for mental health applications. But in my specific case, I might be visually seeing this teenager, they’re disengaged. Maybe the light from the phone is showing that they’re actually watching cat videos, or whatever it is they’re doing in the background, they’re not paying attention to me.

So I really have to use in that situation some clinical judgment. And basically, that clinical judgment might be continuing with a telehealth visit for the next six weeks, is probably not going to be very productive therapeutically, or not a good use of my money, or your money, the patient’s money. And so we really need to think about that in terms of high quality standard of care. So, I think virtual care and standards really depends on both good judgment, preparation and training, and continually reassessing the clinical situation that you’re in, the patient’s situation that they’re in, what ordinary prudent practice looks like. And this is particularly important as tools and technologies evolve, because what could have been the standard of care six months ago, now with new technologies might not be the standard of care now. So, that’s kind of the framework that I would put standard of care around.

Daniel Smith: And going off of that a bit, I was wondering if you could share your thoughts about how AI fits into telehealth settings.

Kathy Wibberly: So, I think AI is really good at certain things right now, but it has not progressed to a point where it can replace a clinical encounter with a provider. So, I think we need to be very clear about that.

AI is really good at visual things. So, if you’re looking at images, if you’re looking at X-rays, if you’re looking at scans, if you’re looking at dermatology pictures, it does as good, sometimes even better than humans, because it doesn’t get tired. It has all of these images now recognized, it knows what an anomaly is. And so AI is really good for that. AI is still not good for contextualizing the patient. AI can’t really understand whether the patient is in an urban area or a rural area, what the differences are. And if they’re talking in ways, in languages, or inserting different ways of speaking, it does not recognize that.

But it is good for scribing as long as the provider is looking at those notes and checking and making sure that there are not hallucinations and things are put in the right place. So I think AI is at a point where it can be helpful. And oftentimes it’s a tool in telehealth encounters, especially for imaging. But in terms of replacing a provider for diagnoses, for assessment in general, I would say it’s not there yet and it may never be there. And I think that there are also real concerns about equity and bias with AI, because AI is only as good as the model that it’s trained on. And so the people who have the data in the system are usually the ones who are getting healthcare, and the people who are not getting healthcare don’t have their data in the system. And so it can very clearly bias the data toward those who are wealthier, who have the ability to pay, who are in certain demographics.

And so I think we just need to be careful and use caution when we’re integrating AI into what we do.

Alexa McClellan: I hope you’re enjoying this episode of On Tech Ethics. If you’re interested in hearing conversations about the research industry, join me, Alexa McClellan, for CITI’s other podcast called On Research with CITI Program. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Now, back to the episode.

Daniel Smith: Going back to what you were talking about with the provider competencies and things like that, a related thing that I wanted to talk about was professionalism and virtual care. So, how should healthcare professionals think about professionalism and boundaries when interacting with patients online?

Kathy Wibberly: Yeah. I think professionalism in virtual care really comes down to being very intentional about things that we sometimes take for granted in-person, because telehealth creates a different kind of interpersonal space. Providers have to think not just about what their clinical competencies are, but also about things like etiquette. So, how they show up and sound on the camera. People often call it website manner instead of bedside manner. And it plays a big role in how patients perceive the quality of their visit, and whether the visit is going well. So in a virtual visit, professionalism includes very basic things like appropriate attire. And during the pandemic, I think people got really casual, and even providers started wearing the t-shirts and the jeans. And so on camera, the patient is kind of looking at them side-eyed, “Are you really a doctor or a nurse?”

But then there’s also the privacy piece, make sure that you’re in a private and quiet environment, that you have good lighting. A lot of the training that we do has to do with not putting the window behind you, because it just goes to you out and the patient can’t really see you. But the reliability of technology is also another piece and being mindful about communication, how you position the camera to allow natural eye contact when you’re speaking with the patient, speaking clearly and deliberately.

One thing that providers often don’t think about is narrating your actions. So if you are, let’s say, having a virtual encounter and you’re looking at the camera, but then you look down to chart, like you’re looking away from the patient, the patient can only see you from the shoulders up usually, and so they don’t know what you’re doing. And so it can project that you are just not paying attention to them, especially salient in mental health encounters, where patients may be thinking, “You don’t care about me,” or, “I’m not important enough that you’re paying attention.”

And so sometimes we just tell providers, all you have to do is really say, “Hey, every now and then I’m going to look away because something you said is really important and I want to make sure that I take notes. And so I might be looking down at my keyboard or looking at your medical record.” And so all you need to do is narrate what you’re doing that helps with that. So it’s that intentional piece, being more intentionally empathetic, because in an office environment, you might reach out and kind of put a hand on a shoulder, or do some things that you can’t do virtually. So you need to reflect that in your tone, or by leaning forward, so that you can recreate that presence.

And I think this is a funny thing, but there have been studies now that show that we often hold telehealth to a higher standard than in-person care. Yet in-person, many patients get about half their visit with the provider talking to them behind the computer screen. Whereas in telehealth, the studies have actually shown that patients often feel they get more eye contact, more focused attention, and the provider has fewer distractions, because the clinician has to be very deliberate about looking at the camera, about staring at the patient, about doing those things. So I think that is one thing that we don’t usually think about.

But you also mentioned boundaries, and I think boundaries is another really important piece about etiquette. So, virtual care gives patients a window into the provider space and vice versa. So it’s really important to think about what that space communicates. We say, “Use a virtual background or use a real background, but make sure that background reflects a professional office setting, or at least a professional setting.” Technology enables great new forms of interaction. It allows you to explore what’s going on in that patient’s home, which is amazing. One of the things you can do is see what’s going on in the refrigerator. “Can you open your refrigerator? Are you eating any food?” But it also allows you to see things that you might not want to see, like the illegal drugs, or sitting on the counter, or the open beer can when this person is in treatment.

So, those are all kind of ethical and professional things that a provider really needs to think through. “Am I going to address the things that I see in the background of this person’s home which they would not have brought into the clinical space?” And really thinking through that. Because you also have different forms of interaction, texting, messaging, remote monitoring. So, really having clear policies about how you’re going to interact with patients in that context.

I think at the end of the day, professionalism and telehealth means holding the standards that we would expect in-person, but really being thoughtful about what additional steps we need to take to convey the same respect, the same presence, and the same level of privacy through a screen. And sometimes it’s those small details that make a big difference.

Daniel Smith: So something that continually comes to mind throughout this conversation is just the importance of establishing trust with patients in virtual or telehealth settings. And an obvious part of that is verifying identity. So, can you talk some more about why identity verification is such a critical ethical issue? And also share some effective ways to approach it while protecting privacy?

Kathy Wibberly: Yeah, absolutely. So, that is one of the best practice that we train on, is that before every encounter that you have with a patient, you need to verify their identity. But I think that there’s also the provider identity that needs to be verified for the patient, and that’s part of that trust piece. So in telehealth, you don’t have the natural cues to get in-person, like someone walking into your dam room, checking in at the front desk, wearing a badge, all of those things. So, for your patients, verification will protect them, protect their privacy and confidentiality, because you’re almost always discussing sensitive information. And this is particularly concerning if their video is poor and you can’t really see what they look like, or they’re just on the phone and you’re doing a audio-only visit. If you don’t really know who that person is, and you start asking questions about personal private information, or describing what their last visit was like, and that’s not the person you’re talking to who are violating privacy and confidentiality of your patient. So, really having a good understanding that this is truly who I’m talking to is important.

There’s also legal context of interactions. So, if you are treating a minor, verifying that this is indeed the person you’re treating, that they are a minor, that there might be some guardianship situations involved, but there are also issues with identity facts that could lead to serious issues like medication misuse. So, if I am impersonating another person and I might know that I’m your patient, and so now I’m calling and saying, “I need my prescription refilled, and can you send it to this pharmacy?” You can have fraudulent access to prescriptions or access to potentially damaging information. There are definitely some bad actors out there. So, if I want to get you fired from your job and I know that you’re having mental health issues, I could be calling your provider and pretending to be you, and getting some information about you that you might not want out there.

So, I think really making sure that you know who you’re talking to is critical, and then documenting what you did in the medical record is also critical to protect yourself, but also to protect your patients. So, what are some processes? How do you do that virtually? You can do this by visual verification. So, if you do have a good visual image with your camera, you can ask the patient to hold up their photo ID next to their picture. You can then check the photo ID, make sure it matches what you’re seeing on camera. And that would be really important if this is the first-time patient, or if it’s a patient you haven’t seen in a long time, you can’t remember what they look like, and you just want to make sure that this is truly who that person is. If you don’t have a visual verification manner, let’s say it’s a telephone only or audio only conversation, then you really need to pair it with some knowledge-based questions. Things like confirming date of birth, address, things that only your patient might know.

I think another thing that we often say as best practice for providers who are working in mental health or potentially abusive situations is to establish a code word with that patient. So, it could be in your first visit you have a conversation and you say, “I know that you might have some people overhearing this conversation in your home, you might not be private. If there’s any time you don’t feel safe, let’s figure out a word that you would use.” And it could be as simple as, if I think you’re not safe, I might ask you a question like, “Have you been to Walmart today?” And you can say yes or no. Or if you’re feeling not safe, what’s your code word? And you could say something like orange. I can start talking about oranges. That means there’s someone listening in. So that is also part of that safety, privacy, protection, and verification piece.

On the provider end, we always say, to establish trust, you need to do some things. So post your photo with your credentials and your licensing information on your clinic website, or on your telehealth landing page if you’re in private practice, so that when that patient logs on, they know that you are the person that was on that website and that they’re not talking to some stranger that they feel like they don’t know. So I think all of that said, identity verification isn’t bureaucracy. It’s not just an extra layer of paperwork. It’s really about safety, and trust, and making sure that there’s integrity in that virtual encounter.

Daniel Smith: And another key theme throughout this conversation is just equity and access. So, I know we’ve talked a lot about how telehealth can expand, access to care. There’s also some ways in which it might limit access to care, we talked a bit about AI. But can you just talk some more about what you think the biggest equity concerns you see are and how the field can address them?

Kathy Wibberly: Yeah. I mean, I think we always say telehealth has the power to expand access, but we often don’t think about how it can unintentionally create new barriers if we’re not thoughtful. So I see most often are challenges related to connectivity, and that means being able to use technology in ways like reliable broadband, a video enabled device that has the most up-to-date software, skills to use it confidently, which we often call digital literacy. And then I think one thing people don’t often think about is access to needed accommodations such as interpreters, ASL support, captioning, for people who might need those accommodations. And much of our technology is designed by able-bodied young digital natives. So, the user experience assumes a level of vision, hearing, dexterity, memory, comfort with technology that oftentimes older adults, people with disabilities, might not have. So when we design systems that have a level of tech-savvy required to navigate, we unintentionally exclude some of the people that could benefit most from virtual care.

And those gaps tend to affect rural communities a lot more, because there are oftentimes older populations and people with disabilities in those areas and households with limited resources. So, a lot of times we think, “Oh, we’ll just get them broadband. We’ll just make broadband more affordable.” But there are still parts of the country where there’s no broadband infrastructure to be purchased even if you had the funds to do it. And so I think that’s where we’re seeing where telehealth risks widening that divide instead of closing it. So, in those situations, like I talk about telephone care, people can end up limited to telephone, or only or to audio-only visits, not because they prefer it, but because video isn’t an option. And that really becomes a challenge when visual cues like nonverbal communication, or clinical assessments really matter and can depend on visual use.

So, some of the solutions that we have seen, really creative ones, are things called telehealth access points, or taps. These are public spaces that are equipped with Secure internet connections, with devices, with private enclosures for virtual visits. And they’re showing up in schools, libraries, community centers, even houses of worship. Some communities have developed device lending programs, so people can check out what they need for a visit. Some hospitals and health systems and even community organizations are hiring people called Digital Navigators, to both help people access and use their devices, but also to train people in using their devices, and to train people on just digital navigation in general. If you can just picture the Apple Genius Bar concept in your local library, or a place of worship or your community center, that’s kind of what that digital navigation piece is. So people can say, “I have a telehealth visit. I’m supposed to use my phone. Can you help me download the software or access this? Or how do I get on the internet safely?”

So, I think really big part is meeting people where they’re at, whether it’s in a rural community that doesn’t have access, or in a housing development where someone might have a cell phone with limited minutes, and they only have 20 minutes for the month. And so how do they then access the device for their visit?

So really creating kind of digital on ramps for people to make telehealth possible.

Daniel Smith: Those are all great considerations. And we have really covered a lot of ground today. So, as one of my closing questions, I want to ask, if for clinicians or organizations who want to deepen their understanding of telehealth ethics, what resources would you recommend they check out?

Kathy Wibberly: Yeah, there are a ton of resources out there for clinicians and organizations who really want to deepen their understanding. A great place to start is our mothership, the National Consortium of Telehealth Resource Centers, and that can be reached at telehealthresourcecenter.org. TRCs, our telehealth resource centers are federally funded, and we provide free unbiased guidance, technical systems training, on everything from policy and ethics, to reimbursement, to workflows, and design. So, we’re really kind of a front door for telehealth support across the country. My own website, which we are one of the regional resource centers, matrc.org, has a ton of resources as well, guidance documents, best practices, resources, as do all the other telehealth resource center.

It’s also, I think, really important to look at your professional organizations, whether you are in medicine, nursing, behavioral health, social work, pharmacy, therapy. Most of those professions have developed detailed guidance on ethical practices in telehealth, and that is more tailored to the scope and standards and regulatory environment of the professions. So, make sure that you look there.

Additionally, there are some professional organizations like the American Telemedicine Association, the Alliance for Connected Care. They all offer guidance on policy, and practice guidelines, and offer thought with leadership to help you stay ahead of emerging trends.

So, there’s a really good ecosystem of high quality, credible resources that clinicians can draw on. And so start with trusted sources, and stay connected with others in your professional community to make sure that you understand what the ethics are in that conversation.

Daniel Smith: That’s great. And I will certainly include links to all those resources in our show notes, so that our listeners can check them out.

So Kathy, my final question for you today is, if you could leave our listeners with one message about ethics in telehealth, what would it be?

Kathy Wibberly: I think telehealth has an even greater potential than we’re seeing now, but it requires us to be intentional. So I think my message would be, we need to build systems that are welcoming, accessible, and trustworthy, and technology will keep evolving faster than our policies. So, as long as we stay committed and grounded to create an environment for an experience that we would want for ourselves and our healthcare and for the people we love, that is what I think should drive how we approach ethics in healthcare.

Daniel Smith: And I think that that is a wonderful note to leave our conversation on for today. So thank you again, Kathy.

Kathy Wibberly: Very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Daniel Smith: If you enjoyed today’s conversation, I encourage you to check out CITI Program’s other podcasts, courses, and webinars. As technology evolves, so does the need for professionals who understand the ethical responsibilities of its development and use. CITI program offers ethics-focused self-paced courses on telehealth, digital health, AI, cybersecurity, and more. These courses will help you enhance your skills, deepen your expertise, and lead with integrity. If you’re not currently affiliated with a subscribing organization, you can sign up as an independent learner. Check out the link in this episode’s description to learn more.

And I just want to give a last special thanks to our line producer, Evelyn Fornell, and production and distribution support provided by Raymond Longaray and Megan Stuart. And with that, I look forward to bringing you all more conversations on all things tech ethics.