Forensic infrastructure for investigating medical crimes in the digital era

Abstract

Healthcare digitalization has reshaped the evidentiary landscape of investigations into harmful medical incidents with potential criminal-law relevance. Electronic health records, medication administration systems, laboratory and radiology platforms, and telemedicine tools record not only clinical information but also metadata, including user actions, timestamps, version histories, and intersystem transactions. Taken together, these layers create a complex digital trace whose evidentiary value depends not only on content, but also on provenance, integrity, completeness, lawfulness of acquisition, and a verifiable chain of custody. This article develops a conceptual and doctrinal-comparative framework for analysing the use of electronic medical data in criminal proceedings. The study does not rely on a structured empirical dataset or statistical testing; instead, it draws on a comparative analysis of seven jurisdictions—France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine—alongside the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, digital forensics standards, and the regulatory framework of digital health. The article proposes a four-level model of forensic infrastructure—digital, procedural, expert, and judicial—and introduces a heuristic functional test of investigative readiness based on independence, sufficiency, timeliness, and reproducibility. It argues that electronic medical data can function as reliable evidence only where institutional mechanisms ensure traceable origin, timely preservation, sufficiently complete extraction, and reproducible expert analysis.