There are many risk management challenges created by the increasing incorporation of electronic communication and documentation media into current medical and surgical practices. Such electronic media provide many outstanding advantages over traditional forms of communication and documentation. At the same time, they also create new legal and ethical hazards that can allow practitioners to unwittingly create physician-patient relationships with people they have never even met, incur huge fines for accidental HIPAA violations, destroy their defense in malpractice cases and endanger their professional licenses, to mention only a few of the potential self-inflicted injuries.
