Doctors who no longer have a secretariat have entrusted their appointment making to the Doctolib application. For those who are proficient with digital tools, finding a healthcare professional and making an appointment have been made easier. However, the absence of direct contact no longer makes it possible to explain your problem to your doctor in order to adapt the consultation time or to benefit from advice.
After having assumed a quasi-monopoly position in the management of consultations, Doctolib offers a centralized storage space for health data. The argument always remains to facilitate the work of doctors. But that’s where the problem lies. Indeed, very sensitive health data is worth gold. This is the reason why Social Security has set up a digital health record, “My health space”, before precisely avoiding the capture of this data by commercial companies.
How, then, can we accept that confidential personal data, covered by medical confidentiality, falls into the hands of merchants who, whatever the controls and rules laid down, will seek to circumvent them to maximize their profits? How can you trust a company that stores its data on Amazon servers subject to American rules which authorize the sale of this data?
What’s more, Doctolib’s financial structure is particularly opaque. The company announces that it has not made a profit so far, but it is valued at more than 6 billion euros. This is typically what Emmanuel Macron and his financial friends call a unicorn, which benefits from numerous direct and indirect aid from the State; with 100,000 to 150,000 professionals subscribing at an average cost of 200 euros per month, that’s more than 330 million per year of health money that ends up in Doctolib’s pockets! And which could, at some point, be bought by a group like Amazon or Google!
The only guarantee of minimal data security is that health insurance ensures its storage and management. For this, it is urgent that the ramp-up of “My health space” accelerates and that this digital tool offers to manage doctors’ appointments. On this issue, as always, the medical profession argues that it does not want to be under the control of Social Security. But is it better to be under Amazon’s? It is therefore urgent to exclude Doctolib from this activity before this affair becomes a scandal of the same type as that of nursing homes or daycare centers.
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