[Ethical issues of new communication and information technologies applied in medicine].
BACKGROUND
The fast development of New Communication and Information Technologies (NTIC) and their use in increasingly numerous fields in medicine; raised new ethical issues. The aim of this paper is to highlight ethical and deontological guidelines for health professionals and physicians which must guide their use of the NTIC.


METHODS
A research in the Anglophone and French medical literature and on the Internet, using various key words related to ethics and medical computing.


RESULTS
Ethical issues are mainly related to the property, the access and the use of the broad data bases of medical records, the legal obligations and ethics which must govern the course of a teleconsultation or a therapeutic remote intervention and the rules which must define the relationship between the teleconsultants and their patients. The use, increasingly frequent, of various expert systems of decision-making and/or of expertise in various clinical settings, also, poses ethical problems relating to the reliability of such systems, the qualifications necessary for their application and the responsibility for their development, maintenance and use. Medical Information available on the Internet, of a very unequal and not controlled quality, raises many questions about the responsibility for the medical professionals in the education for the patients and their warning against sometimes erroneous information published on the Web. The ethical rules of research on the Internet must also be clearly formulated and diffused among the researchers.


CONCLUSIONS
The general principles in front of an ethical problem related to the use of the NTIC remain based on the interest of the patient, the absence of a harmful effect, the respect of the professional secrecy and the safeguarding of the quality of the care and its conformity to the most recent scientific data.
Tougourti
M Nejib
MN
Service de Médécine Interne, Hôpital Razi, Manouba.
Ben Hamouda
Ibtissem
I
Hamza
Mohsen
M
D003142:Communication; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000941:ethics*