Accords Ségur de la Santé: the healthcare sector finally takes a significant step towards digitalization!

“Putting digital technology at the service of everyone’s health, and all in the best interests of patients and their health”: this is one of the challenges cited by Olivier Véran, Minister of Solidarity and Health, in the conclusions of the Ségur de la Santé conference. To meet this challenge, the government has decided to make significant investments: 2 billion euros to make up for lost time in digital healthcare, and to contribute to the transformation, renovation and equipping of medico-social establishments.

This is a historic turning point for the French healthcare sector, which had previously been under-resourced (less than 1.5% of hospital investment budgets, compared with 3% in other European countries), enabling the ecosystem to make a considerable qualitative leap forward and take on its full dimension within the European and global markets.

The digital healthcare players reiterate their desire to get involved, and are at the disposal of the public authorities to participate in governance, and bring about the emergence of a digital healthcare sector. Work on the Ma Santé 2022 roadmap for the digital shift has already been underway for 18 months, with the public and private sectors working together to improve the solutions offered to patients and healthcare professionals, while respecting each other’s roles and implementing virtuous technical, ethical and economic models.

In fact, at the end of April 2020, as part of the 75 proposals for recovery put forward by the digital sector[1], our organizations called for the implementation of this roadmap to be speeded up. The provisions mentioned in the Ségur de la Santé thus represent an additional signal of confidence.

We see six areas as requiring priority investment:

1. The deployment of scalable information systems and the development of innovations, for both healthcare professionals and patients, to help achieve the objectives of quality and efficiency in care paths.
2. Interoperability for improved dialogue between digital solutions, to bring them up to the highest European and international standards;
3. Cybersecurity and health data protection, within a clear ethical framework;
4. Solutions targeting administrative and organizational simplification and improving the efficiency of management processes;
5. Deploying the potential of AI in healthcare through the ethical use of qualitative healthcare data and the deployment of a sustainable business model;
6. The massification of digital and project management skills, the capitalization on knowledge and know-how, and the anticipation of new professions for a solid digital healthcare sector.