What lessons have you drawn from the health crisis for the French healthcare system?

I'd like to tell you about one of the finest moments in my professional career. I came back full time to manage the crisis in my establishment, with fear in my stomach for my carers and professionals. As if in a state of war, we mobilized everyone, modified organizations and processes, invented a thousand things every day and benefited from an incredible solidarity with the teams, but also with the neighbors, the industrialists, the restaurant owners, the hairdressers... We are bound by this experience that we lived together.

As far as the French healthcare system is concerned, I have a lot of respect for the people who do things. It's so easy to say afterwards that things were done badly, but when you're on the front line, it's not so easy to make decisions.

"Faced with the crisis, it was difficult to do better than confine ourselves. We had to play the card of civic responsibility and solidarity. Now, with the experience of this first epidemic wave, we will probably be able to be more nuanced and refined by relying on the commitment of the French people."

It's not naive to see the glass as half full. France absolutely must force itself to see things in a positive light, as this pessimistic logic of permanent self-flagellation is collectively deleterious. This crisis has the merit of bringing into the debate questions linked to our relationship with death, our healthcare system, our relationship with technology...

What were the best things about the crisis?

When I returned to the clinic full-time, we had only an 8-day supply of FFP2 and surgical masks, and I couldn't sleep. I put out a call for help on LinkedIn. The result: 800,000 views, everyone brought us masks and we held out for a month on solidarity. For the PCR tests, we didn't have enough cups to place the samples. I called on the manufacturers, who rallied round to make them. The same goes for closed circuits for respirators: local manufacturers got in touch with manufacturers in Bordeaux, and many hospitals benefited from them.

There are so many things I didn't think possible that have come true: teleconsultations have exploded, patients (average age 63) have agreed to prepare their hospitalization via an online portal. From an organizational point of view, we divided the clinic into two teams that never crossed paths, to ensure that in the event of contamination, the clinic's organization would not be jeopardized. Every week, the two teams challenged each other to share their innovations. It was an impressive display of ingenuity and inventiveness.

City doctors have also taken to teleconsultation. But above all, French citizens have seen the benefits of digital health care, although paradoxically they rejected the STOP COVID app ...

"We're just beginning to have the maturity to take hold of this digital technology, which is for us what the printing press was in the ^18th century for the rise of the Enlightenment and Human Rights. Digital technology must now enter the public debate, so that we can decide what we want to do with it in France and Europe.

What HR skills will be needed to build tomorrow's healthcare response?

Where trust and sound values already existed, players capitalized on them. Unfortunately, this is far from being the case everywhere. Although I'm in favor of raising salaries, I find it irrational to think that this will solve all the problems. The bottom line is that management in the healthcare sector is no longer founded on a foundation of humanistic meaning, based on values of trust. For me, it is this abandonment of the primary meaning of this humanist ethic that constitutes the root of the problem.

"And yet, managing in the healthcare sector is so easy! You just have to love the people who care for you. Healthcare is about men and women who are supposed to take care of others. If we're not humanists, who will be?"

But when you're a humanist, you touch people's hearts. I've been trying to do that for 20 years. Clinique Pasteur is one of the biggest clinics in France, economically efficient, committed to sustainable development and social responsibility, with innovative and committed employees.

Is there any hope of building on these values in the post-crisis era?

We must continue to fight for this. I refuse to be schizophrenic in the working world, i.e. human at home and cold at work. I'm always asked if it works, as if I had to justify an R.O.I. of commitment and love!

"Our approach to relationships in the world of work is mortifying. By conceptualizing the relationship at work, we've turned it into something abstract and inanimate. I reject any conceptualization of managerial models, including those based on trust."

COVID-19 has put the subjects of life and death back on the table. Since everything can collapse overnight, I want to live as best I can as a free and loving man, and militate in that direction. After that, things transform themselves. Even if it's not perfect, it's always alive.

Can we extend this confidence to the decompartmentalization of the healthcare system?

The defensive mechanism of mistrust is contaminating. But so is trust. I spend half my professional time at the Ministry of Health, and I experience exactly the same thing as in my clinic: trust opens up the field of possibilities.

The more we adopt a congruent and sincere posture, the more the links will be rebuilt in the professional world. It'll never be perfect, I'm not naive, but we'll have pushed things in the right direction. It always works: all it takes is to "positively contaminate" two or three people at the start to tip over into positive exponential curves.

You advocate trust and humanism... Doesn't this conflict with your role as pilot of the digital health strategy?

This was my initial training and I've launched several start-ups. Fire was the first technological tool tamed by humans. It can be used to cook food, but also to destroy the village next door. It all depends on the use we choose. As for printing, 18th-century Europe seized on it to turn it into a humanist tool for citizen emancipation and the dissemination of knowledge.

Today, I feel that the rest of Europe no longer believes in humanism with the same fervor. For example, it is allowing digital technology to be approached solely through a liberal, libertarian and transhumanist vision on the US side, and an autocratic and liberticidal one on the Chinese side. Our inability in France and Europe to commit to a humanist vision of the digital world worries and revolts me.

"My deepest belief is that we can turn digital technology into an ethical and humanistic tool for citizen emancipation, health, the memory of humanity, etc. If we affirm this value with faith, we'll be able to attract talent.

For future graduates of Harvard, HEC, Polytechnique..., entrepreneurial gold will be meaning. If we push for this vision, we may not be the best in big data or AI, we may not have as many unicorns as in the Pacific zone, but we will have 4.0 hummingbirds who will do their part in building a global vision that makes sense... There is a fundamental social issue around digital humanism. We can't just let GAFAM and BATX dominate the digital world, at the risk of having a social model imposed on us that doesn't suit us.