The Shared Patient Record: Morocco’s Digital Health Bet
Analysis of Morocco’s shared patient record and electronic care sheet, covering the Kenitra pilot, AMO reimbursements, interoperability, data sovereignty, consent and professional adoption.
The pilot phase of the electronic care sheet was launched in Kenitra in March 2026, with the shared patient record integrated into the same platform and using the same identifiers. The issue goes beyond administrative modernization: it concerns care coordination, expenditure control and medical-data governance. The central question is no longer design, but the concrete conditions for nationwide rollout.
Two Interlocking Systems
The electronic care sheet dematerializes the reimbursement process: each prescriber creates the prescription through their software or the CNSS portal, and the patient receives a prescription with a QR code and a unique number, with services billed separately for faster reimbursement. The shared patient record is the medical history, allowing doctors to consult consultation history in almost all establishments. The first system produces the data; the second capitalizes it, making record quality depend on the rate at which the electronic sheet feeds it.
A Response to Administrative Saturation
The shift to digital responds to a reality that CNSS describes directly: paper-file-based management was no longer suitable, especially with the integration of new populations. The scale is considerable: more than 32 million AMO beneficiaries, compared with 42% of the population before the reform, including nearly 11 million under AMO-Tadamon alone, and more than 14 million files submitted under Tadamon between late 2022 and March 2025. Among them, more than 300,000 concerned chronic and costly diseases, the profile for which a shared history generates the most clinical value. The economic argument is explicit: about MAD 400 million in savings for CNSS, with digitalization already having saved MAD 165 million for the ministry.
Development Cost and Data Sovereignty
Pooling efforts with CNSS made it possible to reduce the overall project cost from MAD 180 million to MAD 15 million, with the system developed by a Moroccan company operating in Morocco and internationally. This local anchoring is not incidental: in a field where health-data sovereignty is a strategic issue, national control of the platform and its hosting is a parameter in its own right.
A Progressive Rollout
The timetable is cautious: after development in 2025 and a testing phase under way since December, the pilot phase was launched in Kenitra at the end of March 2026, with generalization planned gradually between April and June 2026, subject to technical and regulatory validation. The choice of a hybrid model in which paper and digital circuits coexist during the transition limits the risk of disruption, but prolongs the period of double maintenance. The entry barrier has been contained for pharmacies, with the system designed to integrate without heavy investment, since existing scanners are enough to read QR codes.
Structural Obstacles
Although the shared medical record and electronic care sheet are technically ready, successful rollout depends on several conditions. Equipment heterogeneity: a sector representing nearly 6% of GDP still partly operates with paper registers, handwritten prescriptions and telephone appointments. Interoperability: public and private hospital information systems do not communicate spontaneously, the subject of a framework agreement between the ministry, CNSS and the Digital Development Agency. The digital divide: inequalities in access to technology risk widening the gap between urban and rural areas that an equity tool was meant to reduce. Professional adoption: a lack of consultation has been noted, with the first prescription originating from the doctor, who was insufficiently involved, and a transfer of workload that weighs on practices and pharmacies. Finally, consent: rules remain to be defined to guarantee data confidentiality and traceability, a prerequisite for trust, not a technical detail.
A Link in a Broader Architecture
The shared patient record fits into a digital ecosystem that includes the future digital health card intended to centralize health information and a national health map whose completion rate has reached about 95%. The underlying ambition is an integrated digital architecture designed to reshape care coordination and territorial equity, particularly in response to the rise of chronic diseases. The success or limits of the shared record foreshadow those of the whole system.
Conclusion
The shared patient record marks a real step in modernizing Morocco’s health system: mature architecture, controlled development cost, cautious timetable, national expertise and documented benefits. The decisive test, however, lies not in launching the platform, but in its effective generalization: upgrading heterogeneous equipment, ensuring interoperability between public and private systems, connecting rural areas, securing adoption by professionals who will bear part of the cost, and defining a protective consent framework. None of these obstacles is solved by the tool’s availability alone. The Kenitra pilot phase and the rollout planned for summer 2026 constitute the first observation window for the transition from an available system to a system actually used.