Telemedicine in Vietnam — regulations and conditions, with a focus on foreign companies

Khám bệnh, chữa bệnh từ xa — literally "remote medical examination and treatment" — moved out of the COVID-era exception regime and into the ordinary architecture of Vietnamese medical-practice law on 1 January 2024. Luật 15/2023/QH15 names it as a regulated form of practice; Nghị định 96/2023/NĐ-CP details the operational conditions; Thông tư 32/2023/TT-BYT fixes the scope-of-practice tables that determine which titles may perform which acts remotely; and Quyết định 2628/QĐ-BYT (2020) — the Đề án Khám, chữa bệnh từ xa giai đoạn 2020-2025 — remains the operational backbone for the inter-facility consultation network that connects more than 1,500 sites across the country. On top of this medical-practice stack sits a data-and-network overlay — Nghị định 13/2023/NĐ-CP on personal data protection, Luật Giao dịch điện tử 2023 (effective 1 July 2024), Nghị định 53/2022/NĐ-CP detailing the Cybersecurity Law on data localisation, Luật Bảo vệ dữ liệu cá nhân (Luật 91/2025/QH15, effective 1 January 2026), Thông tư 46/2018/TT-BYT on electronic medical records, and the e-prescription rules under Thông tư 04/2022/TT-BYT and its successors. For a foreign company looking at the Vietnamese telemedicine market, the regulatory question therefore has three layers — corporate, clinical, and data — and each has its own choke-points.

The two regulated modes — what the law actually permits

Luật 15/2023 distinguishes two distinct telemedicine modes, and the operational and conditional treatment differs between them:

• Hỗ trợ khám bệnh, chữa bệnh từ xa giữa các cơ sở khám bệnh, chữa bệnh (inter-facility remote support) — a higher-tier facility supports a lower-tier facility on a specific case (consultation, diagnostic review, second-opinion, case conference). The patient remains under the care of the requesting (lower-tier) facility, which keeps the medical record and bears clinical responsibility. The supporting facility's role is documented as remote consultation and counts toward the supporting facility's continuous medical training and technology-transfer mandate under the three-tier system (Điều 104).

• Khám bệnh, chữa bệnh từ xa giữa người hành nghề với người bệnh (direct provider-to-patient telemedicine) — a registered practitioner, practising at a licensed establishment, delivers consultation or follow-up care to a patient remotely. Here the establishment's GPHĐ scope must include the relevant remote-care techniques (telemedicine entries from the danh mục kỹ thuật published by Bộ Y tế), the patient must give informed consent to the remote modality, and the medical record must capture the same data fields that an in-person visit would (history, examination findings within the limits of the modality, diagnosis or working diagnosis, treatment plan, prescription if any, follow-up instructions).

The distinction matters because the conditions and risk allocation are different. Inter-facility support has the more permissive language regime (Vietnamese-foreign cooperation can fall under the Điều 21 exception for technology-transfer / expert-cooperation programmes); direct-to-patient care does not, and the practitioner must meet the full Vietnamese-language requirement unless the patient is a foreign national or shares a mother tongue with the practitioner.

Layer 1 — conditions on the establishment (the GPHĐ side)

The establishment delivering telemedicine — whether on the supporting side, the requesting side, or both — needs:

• A Giấy phép hoạt động khám bệnh, chữa bệnh (GPHĐ) issued under Luật 15/2023 and Nghị định 96/2023, in one of the organisational forms in Điều 48 (bệnh viện, phòng khám đa khoa, phòng khám chuyên khoa, phòng khám bác sĩ y học gia đình and so on).

• A danh mục kỹ thuật (approved list of techniques) that explicitly includes the relevant remote-care techniques. If the only telemedicine acts the establishment intends to perform are general remote consultation and follow-up, the basic telemedicine entries that Bộ Y tế has published cover them; specialised remote acts (remote interpretation of imaging, remote tele-pathology, remote tele-stroke, remote ICU support) require the specialty-specific entries and may fall within the "special-category" list whose addition procedure is now delegated to provincial UBND under Thông tư 04/2026/TT-BYT.

• A người chịu trách nhiệm chuyên môn kỹ thuật whose scope of GPHN covers the telemedicine acts the establishment performs, and not merely the in-person ones.

• Equipment and connectivity adequate to the modality — including a documented connectivity standard, audio-visual quality benchmarks, and a fallback procedure when connectivity fails mid-encounter. Nghị định 96 leaves the granular technical standard to ministerial guidance, but inspection findings increasingly cite the absence of any documented standard at all.

• A medical-records system capable of capturing the telemedicine encounter. If the establishment is on the bệnh án điện tử (electronic medical records) path under Thông tư 46/2018/TT-BYT, the EMR must support remote-encounter metadata; if it is still on paper-based bệnh án giấy, the remote encounter is documented on the standard form annotated with the modality and the connectivity log.

• If the establishment also dispenses e-prescriptions, registration on the national e-prescription system (Cục Quản lý Khám, chữa bệnh's hệ thống đơn thuốc điện tử) and conformance with the relevant Bộ Y tế circular on electronic prescriptions.

Layer 2 — conditions on the individual practitioner (the GPHN side)

Every practitioner who personally examines or treats a patient remotely — whether as the supporting practitioner in a B2B consultation or as the direct provider in a B2C encounter — must hold a Giấy phép hành nghề khám bệnh, chữa bệnh (GPHN) issued under Luật 15/2023 (or a chứng chỉ hành nghề issued under Luật 40/2009 still within its transitional window). The GPHN must:

• Be registered for practice at the establishment that holds the GPHĐ from which the telemedicine encounter is performed. A practitioner cannot personally deliver telemedicine to a Vietnamese patient from outside the GPHĐ perimeter of an authorised establishment.

• Have a scope of practice (phạm vi hành nghề per the Thông tư 32/2023 tables) that covers the medical acts being performed. A general practitioner cannot remotely perform specialty acts outside the scope; a specialist must have the specialty entry on the GPHN.

• For a foreign practitioner, satisfy Điều 21 on Vietnamese language. The exceptions — same-mother-tongue patient, foreign patient, humanitarian mission, short-form technology-transfer / expert-cooperation programmes — are narrowly drawn, and Điều 21 requires an interpreter and a bilingual medical record in all such cases. For practical purposes, a foreign doctor based abroad cannot remotely consult a Vietnamese-speaking patient resident in Vietnam without satisfying the language rule or fitting one of the exceptions, because the "consultation" is a regulated medical act and the practitioner is performing it.

• Comply with Điều 36 on multi-site practice if the practitioner is registered at more than one establishment.

The competency-assessment overlay (Điều 120 and Điều 121) flows through to telemedicine on the same staged timeline as for in-person practice: bác sĩ from 1 January 2027, y sĩ / điều dưỡng / hộ sinh from 1 January 2028, and the remaining titles from 1 January 2029. A doctor who clears the national competency assessment for an in-person scope automatically clears it for telemedicine within the same scope — telemedicine does not generate a separate examination.

Layer 3 — the data, network and electronic-transaction overlay

Telemedicine is, by definition, a personal-data and electronic-transaction event, so the medical-practice stack is read together with:

• Nghị định 13/2023/NĐ-CP on personal data protection (Personal Data Protection Decree, "PDPD"), in force from 1 July 2023, which classifies health data as sensitive personal data, requires a data-protection impact assessment (DPIA) for processing of sensitive data, requires explicit consent in most cases, and imposes a cross-border transfer impact assessment (CBTIA) before transferring personal data overseas.

• Luật Bảo vệ dữ liệu cá nhân (Luật 91/2025/QH15) — the new statute-level personal-data law, in force from 1 January 2026, which elevates the PDPD principles to statute and tightens several points (notably the CBTIA process and the data-subject rights catalogue).

• Luật An ninh mạng 2018 and Nghị định 53/2022/NĐ-CP on data localisation. Article 26 of the Cybersecurity Law and Articles 26–27 of Nghị định 53/2022 require certain Vietnamese-user data to be stored in Vietnam and require offshore providers serving Vietnamese users in regulated sectors (health among them) to maintain a local branch or representative office on the trigger conditions in the decree. The localisation duty is triggered by enforcement notice rather than self-execution, but the regime exists.

• Luật Giao dịch điện tử 2023 (effective 1 July 2024) on the legal effect of electronic transactions, electronic signatures, and electronic documents — the basis on which a telemedicine consultation and an e-prescription can be treated as legally equivalent to their paper counterparts.

• Thông tư 46/2018/TT-BYT on electronic medical records (bệnh án điện tử) — the operational standard for the EMR side of the encounter.

• Thông tư 04/2022/TT-BYT and successor instruments on the national e-prescription system — operational for the prescription side.

For a telemedicine operator, the practical answers from this overlay are: (i) every patient consents in advance to the modality and to the processing of their health data; (ii) the encounter is logged in the EMR with date, modality, identity verification, connectivity events, and the practitioner's signature (digital or qualified); (iii) any storage of patient health data on offshore infrastructure passes a CBTIA before transfer; (iv) any video / audio recording of the encounter, if retained, is treated as sensitive personal data with its own retention schedule; and (v) the provider has a published privacy notice that names the controller, the processing purposes, the retention period and the data-subject rights catalogue.

What changes for foreign companies

The Luật 15/2023 stack itself is neutral as between Vietnamese and foreign-invested operators — a GPHĐ-holding establishment is a GPHĐ-holding establishment, and the practitioner conditions are uniform. The differences sit in the corporate / investment layer and in the language and data rules:

The corporate vehicle. Hospital services (VSIC 8610) and medical and dental practice (VSIC 8620) are conditional business lines for foreign investors. To operate a Vietnamese telemedicine establishment as a foreign-invested entity, the foreign investor must obtain a Giấy chứng nhận đăng ký đầu tư (Investment Registration Certificate, "IRC") under Luật Đầu tư 2020, then register a Vietnamese company under Luật Doanh nghiệp 2020, before applying for the GPHĐ. Vietnam's WTO commitments allow foreign commercial presence in hospital and clinic services in the form of a joint venture, a 100%-foreign-invested enterprise, or a business cooperation contract; the historical minimum capital floors in the WTO schedule were USD 20 million for hospitals, USD 2 million for polyclinics and USD 200,000 for specialty clinics, and licensing authorities continue to read those benchmarks as the floor.

The licensing authority. Under Nghị quyết 21/2026/NQ-CP (29 April 2026), from 1 July 2026 the issuance of GPHN moves to Chủ tịch UBND cấp tỉnh and most of the GPHĐ procedure for non-central facilities moves to the provincial level as well. Foreign-invested operators that historically dealt with Bộ Y tế will, for most procedures, now be dealing with Sở Y tế and UBND tỉnh — including for amendments triggered by adding telemedicine techniques to the danh mục kỹ thuật, for renewals, and for changes in the named người chịu trách nhiệm chuyên môn kỹ thuật. The procedural timelines are tightened — 40 days for assessment of a new GPHN, 10 working days from the assessment report to issuance — but the counterparty changes, and so does the practical cadence.

Cross-border telemedicine — Mode 1 vs Mode 3. Vietnam's WTO commitments in health services are committed in Mode 3 (commercial presence) but not in Mode 1 (cross-border supply). The practical implication is that a foreign clinic without a commercial presence in Vietnam cannot lawfully provide telemedicine to patients located in Vietnam as a regulated medical act under Luật 15/2023 — the practitioner would need a GPHN registered at a Vietnamese GPHĐ-holding establishment. The narrow exceptions for technology transfer, expert cooperation and humanitarian missions under Điều 21 of Luật 15/2023 do allow inter-facility programmes — a foreign hospital can support a Vietnamese hospital on specific cases under a cooperation programme — but those programmes are formal, time-bound, and dossier-based, not a standing service offering.

The Vietnamese-language rule. For inter-facility cooperation the Điều 21 exception is the operational answer; an interpreter is engaged and the record is bilingual. For direct-to-patient telemedicine, the rule is harder: a foreign doctor delivering remote consultations to Vietnamese-speaking patients in Vietnam must either pass the Vietnamese-language requirement or fit within one of the patient-side exceptions (the patient is a foreign national, or shares a mother tongue with the doctor). Marketing language that suggests an open exception for "expat clinics" or "international telemedicine" should be read against the actual text of Điều 21 — the exceptions are narrow.

Data localisation and cross-border transfer. A foreign-headquartered telemedicine provider that processes Vietnamese patients' health data on offshore infrastructure faces two distinct requirements. First, the cross-border transfer of personal data must pass a CBTIA under Nghị định 13/2023 and, from 1 January 2026, under Luật BVDLCN. Second, Nghị định 53/2022 may require local data storage and a local branch / representative office for providers in the health sector that meet the trigger conditions and are subject to enforcement notice. For most foreign-invested operators, the practical answer is to host the patient-facing EMR and the recording layer in Vietnam, and to use offshore infrastructure only for non-personal analytics or for adequately-protected onward transfer.

BHYT reimbursement and the public-payer angle. Khám bệnh, chữa bệnh từ xa is recognised in the Luật BHYT (sửa đổi) 51/2024/QH15 (effective 1 July 2025) as a reimbursable form, with the implementing details and the eligibility list issued through Bộ Y tế and Bảo hiểm xã hội Việt Nam (VSS) instruments. For a foreign-invested operator, BHYT reimbursement requires that the establishment be on the BHYT contracting list and that the patient's referral path under the three-tier system (Điều 104) covers the telemedicine encounter. Many private and foreign-invested establishments operate outside the BHYT contracting perimeter; for those, telemedicine remains a self-pay or private-insurance product.

The 2020 Telehealth Project and its 2026 status

Quyết định 2628/QĐ-BYT (22 June 2020) launched the Đề án Khám, chữa bệnh từ xa giai đoạn 2020-2025 — the Telehealth Project — which built up the inter-facility network now connecting more than 1,500 health establishments across Vietnam, with central hospitals (Bạch Mai, Việt Đức, K, E, Nhi Trung ương, Đại học Y Hà Nội, Chợ Rẫy and others) as the technical core. The Project's first phase nominally ran to 2025; a follow-on instrument extends and revises it for the 2026 onward period, with operational detail flowing through Bộ Y tế circulars and Cục Quản lý Khám, chữa bệnh (kcb.vn) guidance. For foreign-invested operators, the Project network is the practical entry point for inter-facility cooperation — public hospitals on the Project are the natural counter-party for technology-transfer and expert-cooperation programmes under the Điều 21 exception.

Specialised practice modes that overlap with telemedicine

A few adjacent regimes inside Luật 15/2023 affect how a telemedicine operation is built:

• Khám bệnh, chữa bệnh lưu động (mobile / outreach medicine) — sometimes paired with telemedicine in rural-coverage models; conditions on equipment, hygiene, and supervision are codified separately.

• Cấp cứu ngoại viện (out-of-hospital emergency) — a separate cơ sở form; tele-triage and tele-dispatch increasingly sit inside this regime.

• Khám bệnh, chữa bệnh nhân đạo (humanitarian / charitable medicine) — the language relaxation under Điều 21 is broader here, and short-term foreign-team telemedicine projects often build around this mode.

• Khám bệnh, chữa bệnh y học gia đình (family medicine) — codified as a separate establishment form; chronic-care telemedicine sits naturally inside family-medicine clinics.

Practical checklist for a foreign company entering the Vietnamese telemedicine market

For the corporate setup

• Decide between Mode 3 (commercial presence — IRC + local company + GPHĐ) and a Mode-1-style cross-border arrangement under the Điều 21 cooperation exception (inter-facility only, time-bound, with a Vietnamese counter-party that holds the GPHĐ and the GPHN).

• If going for Mode 3, scope the IRC and the company's business-line registration to cover VSIC 8610 / 8620 / 8690 as appropriate, and size the registered investment capital to clear the WTO-schedule floors.

• Confirm with the licensing authority — now usually Sở Y tế under the 1 July 2026 delegation — whether your intended scope is a "first-time GPHĐ" or an "amendment of an existing GPHĐ to add telemedicine techniques"; the procedural path differs.

For the clinical setup

• Identify the người chịu trách nhiệm chuyên môn kỹ thuật whose GPHN scope covers the telemedicine acts; staff up the practitioners with GPHNs registered at the establishment.

• Submit the danh mục kỹ thuật to include the specific telemedicine techniques. If any are special-category, follow the Thông tư 04/2026/TT-BYT path through the provincial UBND.

• If foreign practitioners are part of the medical team, plan against Điều 21 — Vietnamese-language certification, or a cooperation / technology-transfer / expert programme with the operational guardrails (interpreter, bilingual record).

For the data and platform setup

• Run a DPIA under Nghị định 13/2023 / Luật BVDLCN for the telemedicine service. Health data is sensitive — the DPIA is mandatory.

• Run a CBTIA before any cross-border transfer of patient data — even to a parent company's cloud — and document the legal basis and safeguards.

• Map the data hosting and access architecture against Nghị định 53/2022 — if the provider is in a regulated sector (health) and within the trigger criteria, plan for local hosting and a local presence.

• Build the EMR / video / e-prescription stack against Thông tư 46/2018/TT-BYT, Luật Giao dịch điện tử 2023 and Thông tư 04/2022/TT-BYT — and audit retention, access logs, and signature integrity.

• Publish a Vietnamese-language privacy notice that names the controller, the processing purposes, the lawful basis, the cross-border transfer flows, the retention schedule and the data-subject rights.

For the payment and reimbursement setup

• If targeting BHYT, line up the contracting agreement with VSS and the three-tier placement under Điều 104, and confirm that the patient's referral path supports the telemedicine encounter.

• If self-pay or private-insurance, build the consumer-side disclosures against the medical-fee transparency rules of Điều 110 of Luật 15/2023 and the autonomy / pricing regime under Nghị định 60/2021/NĐ-CP.

Direction of travel — telemedicine as a regulated practice, not an exception

The bigger picture is that Vietnamese telemedicine has graduated from a COVID-era exception to a regulated form of practice with its own seat at the policy table — recognised in the new Law on Medical Examination and Treatment, paid (within limits) by BHYT under the 2024 health-insurance amendments, and governed at the data layer by a personal-data and cybersecurity overlay that was not in place when Quyết định 2628/QĐ-BYT was issued in 2020. For a foreign company, the regime is open in principle through the Mode-3 commercial-presence route, but the corporate floor is high (WTO schedule + IRC + GPHĐ), the clinical floor is uniform (GPHN + language rule), and the data floor is global-in-style but localised-in-substance (PDPD + Luật BVDLCN + cybersecurity localisation). The most efficient first step for a foreign operator is usually a cooperation programme with a Vietnamese GPHĐ-holding establishment, building toward a Mode-3 commercial presence once the clinical and data architecture is proven.

Sources

• Quốc hội — Luật Khám bệnh, chữa bệnh số 15/2023/QH15 (9 January 2023; effective 1 January 2024), full text via Cổng thông tin Chính phủ (xaydungchinhsach.chinhphu.vn) and ThuVienPhapLuat — Điều 21 (Vietnamese-language requirement), Điều 36 (multi-site practice), Điều 48 (establishment forms), Điều 80 / Điều 86 (telemedicine), Điều 104 (three-tier system), Điều 110 (pricing), Điều 120 / Điều 121 (competency assessment).
• Chính phủ — Nghị định 96/2023/NĐ-CP (30 December 2023) on the detailing of several articles of the Law on Medical Examination and Treatment.
• Bộ Y tế — Thông tư 32/2023/TT-BYT (31 December 2023) detailing several articles of the Law, including the scope-of-practice tables (Phụ lục I–XII).
• Bộ Y tế — Quyết định 2628/QĐ-BYT (22 June 2020) — Đề án Khám, chữa bệnh từ xa giai đoạn 2020-2025.
• Bộ Y tế — Thông tư 46/2018/TT-BYT on electronic medical records.
• Bộ Y tế — Thông tư 04/2022/TT-BYT on the national e-prescription system, and subsequent amendments.
• Quốc hội — Luật Giao dịch điện tử số 20/2023/QH15 (effective 1 July 2024).
• Chính phủ — Nghị định 13/2023/NĐ-CP on personal data protection (Personal Data Protection Decree, effective 1 July 2023).
• Quốc hội — Luật Bảo vệ dữ liệu cá nhân số 91/2025/QH15 (effective 1 January 2026).
• Quốc hội — Luật An ninh mạng số 24/2018/QH14, with Nghị định 53/2022/NĐ-CP (effective 1 October 2022) detailing data-localisation obligations.
• Quốc hội — Luật Bảo hiểm y tế (sửa đổi) số 51/2024/QH15 (effective 1 July 2025) — telemedicine reimbursement.
• Chính phủ — Nghị quyết 21/2026/NQ-CP (29 April 2026) on cutting and decentralising administrative procedures in the health sector; Bộ Y tế — Thông tư 04/2026/TT-BYT (16 March 2026) on delegation of special-technique addition procedures.
• Quốc hội — Luật Đầu tư số 61/2020/QH14, Luật Doanh nghiệp số 59/2020/QH14, with the WTO Schedule of Specific Commitments on Services for hospital and clinic services.
• Cục Quản lý Khám, chữa bệnh (kcb.vn) — guidance on the Đề án Khám, chữa bệnh từ xa and on Nghị định 96 implementation.
• LuatVietnam, ThuVienPhapLuat, baochinhphu.vn, suckhoedoisong.vn — analytical coverage of the 2024-2026 framework and the data overlay.