Transforming the healthcare system: Alliance eHealth France aims to move up a gear

The Alliance eHealth France is delighted that the strategy for transforming the healthcare system identifies accelerating the digital shift as a priority project, around three specific objectives:

• online access to all patient medical data;
• dematerialization of all prescriptions;
• effective simplification of information sharing between all healthcare professionals.

In addition, the fact that the various bodies involved in digital healthcare have been brought together under an “e-health” mission reporting directly to the Minister of Health sends out a positive signal, and corresponds to a long-standing demand from the digital healthcare industry.

To ensure the success of this digital transformation, the Alliance eHealth France calls on public authorities to pay particular attention to the development of new e-health solutions that enable patients to play a greater role in their own medical follow-up, in liaison with their healthcare team – which goes beyond giving patients access to their own data. In this respect, the development of telemedicine should be widely encouraged, beyond the generalization of teleconsultation.

In terms of financing, the priority given to chronic disease management, building healthcare pathways, prevention and quality is testimony to the public authorities’ awareness of the need for in-depth reform of the way the healthcare system operates.

However, the investments announced to accelerate the digital shift have not yet lived up to their stated ambitions: a change of scale is needed to implement the digital transformation of the healthcare system. It is essential for France to hold its own at a time when a growing number of countries are adopting multi-year plans for the development of digital healthcare, backed by substantial resources.

The Alliance calls for support for the growth of new, digitally-supported healthcare organizations to be combined with the development of a French industrial sector of excellence in e-health, capitalizing on France’s recognized expertise (e.g. algorithms / Artificial Intelligence, connected objects and telemedicine).

The manufacturers in the Alliance eHealth France are at the disposal of the public authorities to begin work on these various projects, and to share with them their thoughts on the multi-year investment program for digital healthcare, which is the only way to make the digital shift in healthcare a reality.