India’s telemedicine rules are real, binding, and shorter than most doctors fear. The Telemedicine Practice Guidelines, issued on 25 March 2020 by the Board of Governors of the Medical Council of India with NITI Aayog, set out what a registered medical practitioner must do on a remote consult: confirm who the patient is, take and record consent, document the consultation like an in-person visit, and prescribe only within defined medicine lists. This walks each of those for a working clinic, and is general information, not legal advice; confirm specifics against the current guidelines and your medical council.
Key takeaways
- The guidelines are binding: they sit in Appendix V of the 2002 Professional Conduct Regulations and carry NMC Act 2019 validity.
- You must document a teleconsult like an in-person visit: identity, consent, the conversation trail, and the prescription.
- Medicines are sorted into List O, List A, List B, and a prohibited list (Schedule X, narcotics, psychotropics).
- An AI scribe can produce the required note faster; it cannot make you compliant. That responsibility stays with the RMP.
Date the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines were issued
Where they sit in the 2002 Professional Conduct Regulations
Medicine categories: O, A, B, and prohibited
Are the telemedicine guidelines actually binding?
Yes, and this is the part doctors most often get wrong by treating them as advisory. The Telemedicine Practice Guidelines were issued on 25 March 2020 by the Board of Governors that then ran the Medical Council of India, in partnership with NITI Aayog. They were folded into Appendix V of the 2002 Regulations on Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics under the Indian Medical Council Act 1956, and they remain valid under the National Medical Commission Act 2019.
In plain terms: this is professional-conduct law, not a suggestion deck. An RMP who consults remotely and ignores the documentation or prescription rules is exposed on conduct grounds if a complaint lands. Treat the guidelines as the standard of care for a remote visit, because the council does.
What do you actually have to document?
The simplest rule the guidelines give you is the most useful one: keep records similar to an in-person consultation. That breaks into a few concrete things.
First, identity. The RMP confirms the identification and credentials of the patient or caregiver at the start. Second, the consultation trail, meaning the record of the conversation and the treatment advised, the same clinical note you’d write in clinic. Third, consent, captured in the patient’s notes. Fourth, the prescription, in the standard format, sent to the patient. The guidelines also expect a log of the interaction itself: the phone record, the email thread, the chat transcript, or the video session that the consult ran on.
How long to keep all this? The guidelines point to the retention periods the various medical-record acts require, and they note a second reason to keep them: your own protection if the consult is ever disputed. A thin or missing record is a liability long after the visit ends.
How does consent work for a teleconsultation?
Consent is documented, but it isn’t always a signed form. The guidelines accept implied consent when the patient initiates the consult, the common case where someone calls or messages you for advice. When you or a health worker initiates the consult, explicit consent is expected. Either way, you record the consent, along with the basics of data privacy and confidentiality, in the patient’s notes.
The practical takeaway: consent is part of the documented record, not a step you do verbally and forget. A note that captures the consult should capture that consent was taken and how. This is exactly the kind of structured detail a scribe-drafted note can carry, as long as you review and confirm it.
Which medicines can you prescribe remotely?
This is where the guidelines are most specific, and where the risk of a misstep is highest. Medicines are sorted into lists:
| List | What it covers | Telemedicine rule |
|---|---|---|
| List O | Over-the-counter (paracetamol, antacids) | Generally prescribable |
| List A | Relatively safe, low abuse potential (eye drops, skin creams, some oral agents) | First prescription on a video consult; refills permitted |
| List B | Add-on medicines optimising an existing regimen | Prescribable for an established condition |
| Prohibited | Schedule X drugs; narcotic and psychotropic substances | Cannot be prescribed over telemedicine |
Beyond the lists, the prescribing standard is judgment-based. The guidelines let you prescribe over telemedicine only after a provisional diagnosis and when you’re reasonably satisfied with the information gathered, and they require confirming the patient’s age before prescribing. Some medicine categories have been amended since 2020, so check the current list rather than a two-year-old summary before you prescribe anything borderline.
A note on what we don’t do here. AI Medical Scribe by Patient Square drafts a prescription as part of the note, which you review and sign; it is a draft, not e-prescribing, and it doesn’t decide what’s permissible under these lists. That decision is the RMP’s, every time.
So where does an AI scribe actually fit?
At the documentation layer, and nowhere near the compliance decision. We’ll be blunt about the line, because health vendors blur it constantly. An AI scribe does not make your teleconsultations compliant. You do, as the RMP. What a scribe changes is the effort of producing the record the guidelines require.
The AI Medical Scribe is one module inside Practice Copilot, Patient Square’s AI platform for the whole practice. It listens during the visit and hands back a structured SOAP note, ICD-10 suggestions, and a prescription draft, ready to review and sign about two minutes after the visit. On a teleconsult that means the conversation trail, the assessment, and a prescription draft arrive as a clean note for you to check, edit, and sign, instead of you typing it up after a back-to-back remote OPD. In a consult that runs in code-mixed Hindi and English, it captures the conversation and the note comes out in clean clinical English.
Here’s the rest of the line we hold. We are not ABDM-integrated; that’s on our roadmap, not live, so we don’t link records to ABHA from inside the tool and we never call ourselves ABDM-compliant. We don’t store the visit audio; it’s processed in memory and discarded once the note drafts. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is role-scoped and logged, and the notes belong to your practice to export or delete anytime. We handle data to DPDP Act 2023 standards, and a SOC 2 Type II audit is underway. The full posture is on our security page.
Pricing is published and ex-GST: it starts from ₹1,599 per clinician a month on annual billing (the Assist plan), plus 18% GST (so Assist works out to about ₹1,887 a month all-in), with Copilot and Autopilot tiers above it and a 7-day free trial. If you want the wider documentation picture, the NMC record-keeping guide covers what a clean clinical record needs, and the DPDP Act guide for clinics covers the data side that telemedicine and in-person visits both have to meet. Or book a short demo and ask where the audio goes and how the note reads after a remote consult.