MyHealth@EU Program in France

The program and facility for sharing data between member states, for patients and Health Professionals

MyHealth@EU

A European facility 

France is putting into place a facility for sharing data between member states of the European Union.

France is actively involved in building Europe’s eHealth future through the rolling out of smart eHealth infrastructure: the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). The CEF's purpose is to develop more harmonised, cross-border healthcare services. One of the main goals of this initiative is to improve the free circulation of patients, health professionals, and health data at the European level (as set out in the European directive on cross-border healthcare) (in French).

This infrastructure is progressively being introduced in 22 EU countries: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.

ehdsi
Figure 1 eHDSI facilities for member states

The European Commission has made this infrastructure available and each member state has set up its own National Contact Point for eHealth (NCPeH) that is connected up to the Commission’s coordination services. The ANS has been designated as the NCPeH for France by the Ministry of Health (FR MoH). 

The French NCPeH will serve as the intermediary between the NCPeHs of other countries and national facilities such as the Shared Medical Records (DMP). It also takes care of transcoding and translating documents (from French to English and vice versa).

Using the facility in practice

France is making the facility available for data-sharing according to a calendar agreed by the European network of eHealth strategy representatives.

The interoperability of digitalised patient records is being introduced progressively according to a tailored calendar signed up to by member states. It is based on the types of usage that have been prioritised: the first two uses are the European Patient Summary and e-prescriptions. Planned forthcoming usages are: vaccination history, radiology results, biological analyses, hospitalisation reports, inclusion of rare diseases in patient summaries, etc.

For the European Patient Summary, the project has been divided into two parts which involve the NCPeH in different ways:

pays A et B
Figure 2 left: case of usage (Country B) involving a foreign patient in France consulting a French healthcare professional (e.g. Finland), right: case of usage involving a French patient abroad consulting a healthcare professional in another member state (Country A)

Country A case : The French patient abroad

In this case, the French patient consults a foreign healthcare professional in another Member State, whom, with the patient’s consent, can consult their European Patient Summary (EPS) (in French) stored in their Shared Medical Record (DMP) (in French). The document consulted is translated into the native language of the healthcare professional.

 

Country B case : The foreign patient in France

In this case, a foreign European patient consults a French healthcare professional in France who, by accessing the secure eHDSI facility, can consult the patient’s European Patient Summary stored in the national facility. The document consulted is translated and displayed in French.

The interface will enable all French healthcare professionals possessing a healthcare professional card (CPS or e-CPS) to access the European Patient Summary of any eligible foreign patient who consults them. 

  • In 2021, the French National Contact Point for eHealth (NCPeH), gateway for health professionals to access European patients' data received its go-live, and now all Health professionals in France can access the service throught the platform: https://www.sesali.fr/ (in French)