Compliance of a remote medical consultation in Georgia is a patient-oriented procedural matter: consent, information and documentation operate at a digital screen with exactly the same strictness as in an office. The Law on Medical Practice carries these three pillars in separate articles: informed consent (Article 44), the provision of information to the patient (Article 39) and access to medical documentation (Article 41), while the responsibility for a remote recommendation comes from Article 90. This page describes each pillar with its article, shows the narrow exceptions governing the withholding of information, and demonstrates that distance lightens none of these duties.
Informed Consent — On Both Sides of the Screen
Before the delivery of a medical service, the subject is obliged to obtain the patient’s oral or written informed consent to the intended intervention (Article 44, paragraph 1). The remote form does not lighten this duty: whether the consultation runs by video call or by message, consent precedes the service. Written consent is mandatory before grave interventions: any surgical operation (except minor manipulations), abortion, catheterization of blood vessels (except peripheral veins), transfusion of blood or its components, hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis, artificial insemination, sterilization, transplantation of a human organ and the use of human tissue or cells, genetic testing, gene and radiation therapy, chemotherapy of malignant tumours (paragraph 2). The telehealth consent templates of American practice carry no authority in Georgian law — the document must be built on the requirements of the Georgian statute, not imported as a form.
The Withholding of Information — A Narrow Exception and Its Procedure
Article 39 regulates not only the duty to inform but also the narrow cases in which information is not supplied to the patient. The information of the first three sub-paragraphs of paragraph 1 — the state of health, the results of examinations and the types of service — is supplied to the patient only with their consent, except where non-supply may cause serious harm to the health or the life of the patient or of a third person. Where a grounded suspicion exists that the supply of information will cause serious harm to the patient’s health, the subject does not supply it — but such a decision is confirmed by the medical ethics commission and, in its absence, by a second subject of independent medical practice. The decisive word belongs to the patient: if the patient insistently demands the information, the subject is obliged to supply it even then. In every case of non-supply the subject must enter in the medical documentation a record indicating the ground of the non-supply — even the exception leaves a documentary trace. In remote care this trace matters doubly: it is precisely the record that proves who took the decision, which body confirmed it and on what ground.