Sending a message directly to your doctor via the Doctolib platform will now be possible: the site connecting practitioners and patients online announced on July 29 the arrival of “new services”, including a “Patient Messaging” in an email addressed to its users. Doctolib, which facilitates the making of medical appointments, specifies that this secure messaging service is reserved for “requests to a health actor whose user is already a patient” and “are not intended to carry out consultations or medical visits, or to obtain medical reports, or to respond to emergency situations”, in its conditions of use.
Thus, the procedure to follow in order to organize a consultation with a specialist will remain unchanged. Doctolib already allowed users to attach medical documents, useful for their consultation, directly on the platform. Practitioners can also attach prescriptions or reports on the site, after the consultation with the patient.
Concretely, the possibility of contacting a healthcare professional via this messaging service should facilitate certain procedures for patients. While many media mention prescription renewals without having to go through the doctor’s office, Doctolib is stalling and says the company has yet to define the details of this feature by November 2023, when the device is expected to launch. ’tool. “We co-build our services with healthcare professionals”, explains the platform, which adapts to the fact that “some of them have told us of their need to have secure messaging with their patients”. Indeed, most of the exchanges between patients and practitioners taking place outside the platform are done by SMS, phone call, e-mail, or with the administrative staff, which can sometimes make communication more scattered, and undermine the data confidentiality.
Although the terms of use specify that Patient Messaging is not “a means of generating digital medical prescriptions, a means of generating medical reports, nor an instant or real-time chat-messaging system between the user and the health actor”, the possible functionality of prescription renewal through this service could facilitate the steps of patients who need to follow a long-term treatment or who are suffering from a chronic disease, who will not have thus more to move. Doctolib specifies that the tool on the side of health professionals will be optional, who will be “free to use this functionality or not”.