Every day, the National Inter-regime Health Insurance Information System (SNIIRAM) records information on the health of 63 million French people. Since August 13, a decree authorizes a widening of access to this database to different organizations, whereas only the Health Insurance was entitled to it before.
“For a long time, doctors have been asking for access to this data in order to use it on a medical and statistical level and to advance research,” says Jérôme Marty, president of the French Union for Free Medicine (UFML). What makes it react is that a user such as the National Union of Complementary Health Insurance Organizations (Unocam) is part of this expansion, aimed at monitoring the prescriptions and “behaviours” of practitioners, establishments and patients, according to the UFML. Indeed, Unocam brings together operators in complementary health insurance, whether they are mutuals, insurance companies, provident institutions. “They must not have access to this data”, claims Jérôme Marty.
According to him, this private organization could use patients’ medical data, which will prescriptions to the calculation of costs and reimbursements, through the activity data of practitioners, for economic purposes. “These are funders, they should not have this data in hand. If this is the case, it will be the loss of medical quality and the loss of anonymity, even the end of medical secrecy“, he is alarmed. While this enlargement started from a “good feeling”, the UFML therefore denounces “significant lobbying operations carried out in order to obtain these data”. Faced with the application of this new decree, the UFML calls on each doctor and patient associations to be extremely vigilant about the abuse of the use and the risk of commodification of this data.
The decree can be consulted at the following address: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000027830713
