It is a platform that we all now know, thanks to the vaccination campaign carried out to fight the Covid-19 epidemic: Doctolib, digital crossroads when you want to make an appointment to receive a dose, now claims some 60 million patients, in France and abroad. Today, a third of caregivers French people are now equipped with at least the online agenda tool, to manage appointments in a few clicks. Doctolib claims 150,000 users among healthcare workers.
In order to expand, the platform bought out some of its competitors such as MonDocteur. She also approaches practitioners with sometimes a little insistent methods, as explained by Marie, general practitioner in Finistère. “It happened among my colleagues that an appointment was made for a medical reason, it was in fact a representative of Doctolib who wanted to access the doctor’s office. It was even stronger at the start of the Covid crisis, with a big commercial forcing: at that time, they wanted to position their teleconsultation software“.
To be able to use the basic diary and the management of appointments, Doctolib charges each caregiver 129 euros per month, 79 more if they also want the teleconsultation tool. In spring 2020, the number of users increased tenfold. Doctolib continues to canvass; of the thousand jobs created within a year, a third will be salespeople.
This market leader status sometimes annoys competition, with une investigation for “abuse of dominant position”, still ongoing. A second investigation was also launched when the Parisian public hospitals of the AP-HP also chose Doctolib to organize the consultations. The competition, who lodged a complaint, also wanted to be able to access reservations.
This quasi-hegemonic position also raises the question of data management. Information on the identity of patients is stored on a Doctolib cloud, hosted by the American Amazon Web Services. Doctolib is even going one step further today with “Doctolib Médecins”, a new software in which the practitioner enters not only the identity of the patient but also all his medical data, after each consultation.
With the software ‘doctor’ we change level. We have the entire medical file online, that is to say all your data, your history, your blood tests, your CT, MRI, ultrasound reports … it’s secure, but it’s is online.
Jean-Jacques Fraslin, general practitioner
to franceinfo
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Doctor Jean-Jacques Fraslin is however enthusiastic about the use of this new tool, which already saves him an hour of work per day. He could also tomorrow share his data with the patient and other caregivers.
Doctolib has been able to forge its model by slipping into the gaps left by Health Insurance and the public authorities. “The power of Doctolib is compared to the weakness of theFrench state for almost twenty years to digitize our health system, estimates the health economist Frédéric Bizard. You just have to go to ameli.fr to see that you are dealing with a site that corresponds to a site from about twenty years ago. “
For the economist, “A from the moment theState is unable to do so, one might think that a government is saying to itself: let Doctolib compile and manage health data instead of Health Insurance. But that would mean the collapse of our health system. The fault is still more on the side of our public authorities than that of a private actor seeking to develop.“
L’State has not quite given up on the game. Next year, he wants to generalize a new tool, “My health space”, which should replace the shared medical file (DMP). This device, launched fifteen years ago had been a total flop with less than 10 million French people to have opened a file, which most of the time had even remained empty.
The Managing Director of Doctolib, Arthur Thirion assures him: “OIt is not intended to do the work of the National Health Insurance Fund. We will be working with them, potentially as part of My Health Space, but these are two very different things.“
In the meantime, Doctolib is stepping in the door for the digitization of medical data. As with the vaccination against Covid-19, the start-up knows how to make itself very useful, even essential when the public authorities are not fully there.
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