imbroglio of data between SI-Dep and the shared medical file

Patients receiving Covid screening certificates when they have not been tested: this is the imbroglio that the French health authorities have been trying to unravel in recent days.

According to information from Worldmore than a hundred French people have been surprised in recent weeks to discover in their online social security medical file – the former “Shared medical file” now known as “My health space” – a Covid screening certificate… Without even having been sick or tested.

See the graphics: Covid-19: the epidemic dashboard

After having been alerted by multiple reports, the teams of the General Directorate of Health (DGS), the Health Insurance Fund (Cnam) but also the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) which manages SI-Dep, the computer system in which the Covid tests are recorded, are only just beginning to understand the reasons for this confusion.

For the past few weeks, SI-Dep has automatically sent the screening certificates of the patients tested to “My health space”. A way to keep track of a Covid infection if necessary, while the long-term effects are real and still poorly knownbut also to quickly abound a device recently relaunched : “My health space”, officially set up by the government last February, is now created automatically for each insured person and is intended to serve as a digital health record by centralizing all of a patient’s medical data.

But this is where the shoe pinches, since in several cases, SI-Dep sent the certificate to the wrong person.

A computer problem

In more than half of the cases, it is a computer problem. When the social security number is not known to SI-Dep (because it was not entered by the laboratory at the time of the test, for example), the latter uses a tool from the Health Insurance supposed to find the number thanks, in particular, to the names and date of birth of the person tested. Except that, badly configured, this computer program sometimes fails.

He can for example be fooled by homonyms and close dates of birth, mistaking a person who would have entered his marital name rather than his birth name, and would have a first name identical or close to a member of the family his husband -se. The execution of the program can also stumble on compound first names, for example looking for “Jean Martin” rather than “Jean-Michel Martin”. Sometimes, the explanation is more prosaic: certain errors are thus explained by an error when entering the social security number at the time of the test.

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