Exchanging health data in complete safety

The protection of patient data is essential to the development of eHealth systems. The day to day preoccupation of health and social care professionals to keep sensitive health data confidential shapes professional practices and requires constant vigilance when it comes to sharing patient information.

Electronic transfers need to be secure to guarantee high-quality, coordinated treatment that respects the patient’s right to privacy. The interoperability of secure health messaging services enables MSSanté to play a key role in protecting exchanges within a secure shared space.

MSSanté also enables professionals who are authorised to exchange health data to respect their professional responsibilities. Using a secure messaging service ensures that the confidentiality of patient data is respected in compliance with the regulatory framework established by CNIL (France’s national data protection authority) and with the Public Health Code.

A secure space

MSSanté hosts messaging service providers that respect security and interoperability requirements and are under contract with the Agence du Numérique en Santé, which manages the secure space.

The MSSanté secure space draws on the following resources:

• the Healthcare Professionals Directory, which contains details of all professionals registered by the competent authority of which they are a member. These individuals form a closed community of users who are clearly identified within the secure space – a community that is progressively being extended to include social care workers so that they too have access to a secure health messaging service;

• a ‘whitelist’ of operators managed by the Agence du Numérique en Santé whose messaging domains are authorised to exchange data within the secure MSSanté space;

• reference documents containing internet and messaging service norms to help industrial companies, healthcare establishments and institutions to develop services that comply with current standards.

MSSanté is supported at the national level and is one of the core eHealth projects. The use of a professional messaging service integrated into the MSSanté secure space is not compulsory per se. However, all healthcare professionals must adhere to the legal framework pertaining to the exchange of personal data defined in Article L1110-4 of the Public Health Code (in French) and to the hosting of the data defined in Article L1111-8 (in French). Personal health details are sensitive data protected by law whose processing is subject to the principles of data protection as set out in France’s data protection law (the Loi Informatique et Libertés).