Report · 2015
La santé, bien commun de la société numérique
[Health, a common good of the digital society — Conseil national du numérique (French national digital council) report, 2015]
Report on the place of digital technology in the health system, the governance of health data and the building of patient trust.
The report argued for a governance of health data grounded in patient trust and in the collective nature of that data. Two major schemes have been created since: the Health Data Hub in 2019, and the nationwide roll-out of the espace numérique de santé (the personal digital health record) in 2022.
This entry should be read alongside the Villani report, whose first strand explicitly took up the idea of centralising health data for research purposes, and justified it in the name of sovereignty. Three years separate the two texts, and they push in the same direction.
The hardest test is therefore shared by both: the controversy over hosting the Health Data Hub with an American provider, and the legal challenges that followed. The question to ask is not who was right, but whether the 2015 report even asked it.
What the report had not foreseen, no one had foreseen: digital health technology was deployed by the public-health constraints of 2020, not by planning. Practices installed in three months had resisted ten years of change-management efforts. That is a lesson about digital public policy in general, and it is not a comfortable one.