It’s a common mishap: feeling feverish one morning and needing to see a doctor quickly. In just a few clicks, an appointment is made on a telemedicine indiana site. A professional appears on a screen ten minutes later. A prescription and care sheet are sent by email after a short interrogation. Simple and quick, the formula is surprising. How can we access a doctor so quickly, when it is sometimes so difficult to get an examination close to home?
It’s a common mishap: feeling feverish one morning and needing to see a doctor quickly. In just a few clicks, an appointment is made on a teleconsultation site. A professional appears on a screen ten minutes later. A prescription and care sheet are sent by email after a short interrogation. Simple and quick, the formula is surprising. How can we access a doctor so quickly, when it is sometimes so difficult to get an examination close to home?
“Because doctors are more and more on these platforms and less and less in offices! », replies Doctor Agnès Giannotti, president of the union of general practitioners MG France, who observes with suspicion these almost immediate connections via video. They make certain liberal doctors fear an “Uberization” of health, associated with all kinds of mercantile abuses.
The subscription offered by the private Ramsay group – 11.90 euros per month to be able to “teleconsult” on demand outside of any coordinated care pathway – also caused controversy, in June 2023, to the point of mobilizing a mission flash on the subject in the National Assembly.
To regulate the practice, the public authorities have put in place safeguards: in 2024, only platforms which respect precise specifications will be able to continue to bill health insurance for care, and the prescribed stops will be limited to three days. The proliferation of these offers, favored by the difficulty of access to care in many French regions, nevertheless raises questions about the place that teleconsultation will ultimately occupy, and according to which model, in the medical landscape.
Reimbursed since 2018, teleconsultation, initially marginal, took off with the Covid-19 pandemic. So that the French continue to receive treatment despite confinement, Health Insurance has covered 100% remote consultations for the duration of the health crisis. Their number thus increased from around 80,000 in 2019 to nearly 18 million in 2020, including 4.5 million for the month of April 2020 alone. It has fallen since then, and remains fairly stable around 1 to 1.2 million monthly appointments reimbursed, which represents approximately 4% of all medical consultations. Most appointments are carried out by general practitioners and the patients concerned remain predominantly young and urban.
Exceptions
The teleconsultation market was estimated to around 100 million euros in 2022 by the research firm Xerfi, a figure which takes into account equipment sales, and which could reach 130 million euros in 2025.