Compliance
How MedicSewa follows Nepal's telemedicine rules
Telehealth in Nepal is governed by the Nepal Medical Council's Telemedicine Guidelines, alongside the country's consumer protection, electronic transaction, and data privacy laws. This page explains what that means as actual product behaviour — not general reassurance.
Regulatory framework
The laws and guidelines MedicSewa operates under
Five sources, together — a clinical guideline for how care is delivered, and four laws covering the platform, the record, and the data.
- NMC Telemedicine Guidelines
- Nepal Medical Council, May 2020 — the clinical-practice standard for how a registered doctor may deliver care remotely. This is the framework the sections below map to directly.
- Consumer Protection Act 1998
- Covers MedicSewa as a paid consumer service — clear pricing, and a real complaints path if something goes wrong with a booking.
- Electronic Transaction Act 2004
- Gives legal standing to the electronic records this platform keeps — appointments, prescriptions, invoices — as valid documents, not just internal notes.
- National ICT Policy 2015
- The government's broader policy on how technology systems in Nepal should handle information and interoperate.
- Privacy Act 2018
- Nepal's core personal-data-protection law — what may be collected, why, and who may see it.
In practice
What the guideline requires, and what the product does
Each of these maps to a specific clause of the Telemedicine Guidelines — cited so a doctor or patient can check the source themselves.
You know who you're consulting
Before a video consultation begins, the patient sees the treating doctor's name and Nepal Medical Council registration number — not a generic label. The same number appears on the doctor's public profile and on every prescription they issue.
Recording asks first, every time
If a consultation is recorded for the clinical record, the patient is asked directly, in the call itself — separate from agreeing to use MedicSewa at all. Declining doesn't end the consultation; it just means it isn't recorded, and either answer is logged as its own event.
A diagnosis has to exist before a prescription is final
A consultation record can't be closed out — and its prescription can't be issued — without a diagnosis on file. Medicines classified as narcotic or poisonous under the Drug Category Rules can be marked as not prescribable through telemedicine at all, and the platform enforces that at the point of prescribing.
Extra care when a patient can't consent for themselves
When a patient is a minor, booking their consultation requires recording who is attending with them — name, relationship, and a way to reach them — before the appointment can be confirmed.
Referrals and second opinions are on the record
When a doctor refers a patient elsewhere, or brings in another practitioner for a second opinion, that's recorded against the consultation it came from — who, why, and to whom. The doctor who saw the patient stays responsible for their care either way; this is documentation, not a handoff.
Your account is protected beyond a password
Two-factor authentication is available on every account, sessions time out automatically after a period of inactivity, and credentials are never stored as plain text.
Ongoing
This is a program, not a checklist
Telemedicine regulation in Nepal is still comparatively new, and MedicSewa's own compliance work is reviewed and extended on a rolling basis rather than treated as finished. If you have a specific compliance question — as a patient, a doctor, or on behalf of an institution — write to us and we'll answer directly rather than pointing back at this page.