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Now called "My Health Space", the digital health record of the French finally seems to take off, after two decades of trial and error.

In just over a year, 8,4 million people, or 13% of the population, have requested the keys (the password) to this digital safe, which stores their biological analysis results and medical imaging, their hospitalization or consultation reports, prescriptions and other health documents.

But more than this number of users, all in all still modest (the objective is to cover the entire population), the Ministry of Health welcomes the strong growth in the number of documents stored in French health spaces.

Today, nearly 10 million documents are filed each month by hospitals, laboratories and practitioners. This is about half of the long-term objective set for My Health Space (i.e. 250 million documents stored per year), underlines the ministry.

And that's already as much, in one month, as what the Shared Medical Record (DMP) had collected in its entire existence, predecessor of Mon Espace de Santé, itself the umpteenth avatar of a project launched in 2004 and redesigned several times.

What differentiates Mon Espace Santé from previous attempts? It was created automatically for each insured person, unless they object in writing. And it is supplied with documents, again automatically, thanks to the effort to update the armada of medical software used by caregivers.

For the moment, hospitals and medical analysis laboratories are the main providers, with respectively 34 and 33% of the documents sent to the Espaces des Français. The challenge now is to convince self-employed practitioners to supply their patients' health space more widely.
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My Health Space is "major progress in France", according to Arthur Dauphin, project manager at France Assos Santé, which brings together associations of users of the health system.

"Each user can benefit" from this grouping in the same place of all his medical documents, even if he keeps them for himself, refusing to share them with his caregivers, he says. To allay fears of a health "Big Brother", users have the possibility if they want to hide some, or even all, of the documents placed in their digital safe.

Associations for the defense of freedoms have warned against Mon Espace Santé, including La Quadrature du net, which had called on the French to expressly refuse the creation of an account. “Any centralized file, any database, presents the defect of centralizing data whose dispersion can paradoxically be an advantage”, she estimated during the public launch of My Health Space. La Quadrature particularly criticized the way in which this digital safe manages user consent, which it believes is neither "respectful", nor "reliable", nor "realistic".

The call for a boycott seems to have been little heard, since only 2% of French people have expressly refused the creation of an account, according to figures from the ministry.

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