Faced with the resurgence of fraud and the emergence of a business business, the government is setting up new restrictions for teleconsultation work stoppages.
Telemedicine has been much democratized in recent years, especially under the leadership of the successive confinements caused by the Pandemic of Covid-19. The practice is perceived by the public authorities as one of the means of fighting against the medical deserts which strike France, and which pose serious difficulties of access to care for many people.
The possibility of consulting a doctor at a distance in videoconference, with a computer, a tablet or a smartphone and without the need to obtain a physical appointment in a office, is indeed a relief for many patients. Especially in regions where it is difficult to find a free doctor in a reasonable time or accepting new patients – the famous medical deserts – or, simply when you cannot move. But it is also a boon for some unscrupulous practitioners, who saw the opportunity to set up a flourishing business.
This is how they have multiplied in recent years the platforms and websites promising to quickly and easily obtain work stoppages, sometimes completely legitimate and sometimes complacency. To stem this expanding phenomenon, the legislator therefore comes to put a regulatory screw, with new measures voted in the Social Security finance law 2025.
Since February 2024, the law has already strictly framed the work stoppages prescribed during medical teleconsultations. In this context, a doctor could neither issue a stop over a duration greater than three days, nor extend an existing judgment beyond this duration. The only exceptions planned: if the practitioner was the attending physician or the employee’s referent midwife, or if the employee could justify the impossibility of obtaining a face-to-face appointment to extend his work stoppage.
There Law n ° 2025-199 of February 28, 2025 social security financing for 2025 Still tackling the tone, by establishing new rules targeting specifically online practitioners. In his article 54, the text stipulates as follows: ” No online service provider can set up a platform aimed at providing, explicitly or implicitly, acts of telemedicine prescribing or renewing a work stoppage ».
The message is therefore perfectly clear and is addressed directly to (very) many sites offering this kind of service, and which have flowered on the web in recent years. The same article also introduces the prohibition, for ” a health professional exercising his activity mainly abroad », To deliver or extend a work stoppage during a medical teleconsultation.