The Ministry of Health will have to justify
,
Monday March 8 before the Council of State
,
the choice of Doctolib for making an appointment as part of the French vaccine strategy against Covid-19.
Along with Maiia and Keldoc, the platform is one of three private sector companies to have been selected by the government to manage this task.
Several doctors' unions but also representatives of patient associations denounce an insufficient level of security for the storage of health data of millions of people.
They accuse the Franco-German company of using the services of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of the American e-commerce giant.
“Amazon Web Services is subject to American law which authorizes the collection of data”, assures France 24 Me Juliette Alibert
,
who represents all the applicants.
“Knowing what time you saw a particular doctor is a health data”.
In the sights of the plaintiffs: the Cloud Act
.
This text notably allows United States intelligence agencies to access information stored on the servers of American companies.
For its part, Doctolib wants to be reassuring and affirms in a press release to have made public use of Amazon's services since May 2019. These figures are hosted in France and Germany, so it is indeed European law and the General Regulation on the Data Protection (GDPR) entered into force in May 2018 in the EU, which apply.
The Microsoft precedent
But according to Me Juliette Alibert, these precautions are not enough because “American law has significant extraterritorial effects which do not guarantee a level of protection in accordance with the GDPR.
It doesn't matter where that data is
. ”
The lawyer relies in particular on European case law.
Last July, a major upheaval took place in the field of data protection.
The Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the Privacy Shield, a text which established that American law offered the same guarantees as European law.
A court decision that seriously compromised another contract between the French government and Microsoft.
The state then wanted to entrust the American giant with the management of the Health Data Hub, a mega-file supposed to compile all the data of the French health system.
The government had to review its copy after a judgment in October 2020. The Council of State recognized “the risk of a transfer of data to the United States” after an unfavorable opinion from the CNIL, the French data gendarme personal.
Even if Microsoft was ultimately not excluded from the case, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran
,
promised to entrust the storage of the data to a French or European host.
Patient confidence at stake
With their legal action, the doctors' unions want to draw the attention of all players in the health sector to the issue of data protection
,
“intimately linked to medical confidentiality which is essential to maintain the confidence of patients”, believes Benoît Blaes
,
from the National Union of Young General Practitioners (SNJMG)
,
which is one of the applicants.
Doctolib now claims “more than four million vaccination appointments” since the start of this campaign.
Suffice to say that the Franco-German society
,
which today weighs more than a billion euros, is an essential tool for the government in the fight against Covid-19.
But the increasingly important place given to the private sector questions some health professionals.
“These software publishers or meeting platforms
are services that aim to generate profits, underlines Benoît Blaes.
Their primary objective is not to improve the quality or safety of care ”.
If the Council of State should rule by Wednesday in this case, it is however unlikely - as the European media network Euractiv reminds us - that the judge will immediately suspend the partnership between the State and Doctolib
,
in the with regard to the “technical and legal complexity of the file”.
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