Unique patient concept: a key choice for European epidemiology.

The French Ministry of Health is setting up the personal medical record (PMR or DMP for Dossier Médical Personnel in French). This innovating tool is highly expected and will be extremely useful for the therapeutic follow-up as well as for epidemiological studies on which public health policies are based. Therefore the currently planned identifying process should prevent any epidemiological use of these data. Numerous scientific organisations have alerted government powers about the threat that this impairment represents, and they wish to promote some secure procedures that exist, which have already proved their efficiency at the national and international level.