Carte Vitale App: How the QR Code Works at the Doctor's
With the carte Vitale app, France's digital health card, your phone displays a QR code and the healthcare professional's reader scans it. You open the app with your code, choose QR code or contactless mode depending on the practice's equipment, and the scan triggers an online authentication. The software then fetches your entitlements and sends the claim. Every insured person has been able to activate it since 18 November 2025.
The app took a long time to reach everyone, and it is not yet accepted everywhere. Here is how it actually works, what a practice or pharmacy needs, and why you are still better off keeping the green card in your wallet.
Who can activate the carte Vitale app, and how?
Anyone covered by French social security, whatever their scheme: the general scheme, the MSA agricultural scheme, MGEN or other special schemes. The app is free on Android and iOS, and there are two activation routes.
The first goes through France Identité, the state digital identity app, and opened on 18 March 2025 to holders of the credit-card format identity card. The second, opened to everyone on 18 November 2025, relies on a short video of your face and identity document. The conditions, as presented by Santé.fr with Service-Public.fr:
| France Identité route | Video route | |
|---|---|---|
| Identity document | Credit-card format identity card | Old or new French identity card, French passport, residence permit, or Belgian, Spanish or Portuguese identity card |
| Minimum age | 18 | 16 or 18 depending on the scheme |
| Other condition | Digital identity already activated in France Identité | Active ameli account |
| Phone | Android 11 or iOS 16.6 minimum | Android 10 or iOS 16.6 minimum |
If you have already activated France Identité, the first route is the quickest, since your identity has already been checked.
What happens when the professional scans the code?
Scanning the code opens a secure session between the professional's billing software and the carte Vitale app system. The code does not just stand in for the card's chip: it starts a chain of online operations.
The Assurance Maladie, France's national health insurer, set out the process in a presentation to professionals dated 23 April 2026. On your side, four steps:
- Open the app with your personal code or biometrics.
- Choose the mode, QR code or contactless, as the professional tells you.
- Hold the phone up to the reader.
- Find the expense afterwards in the app's "Activités" tab.
On the professional's side, the scan triggers an online authentication, then the software queries the ADRi service to get your administrative situation and entitlements, and the professional signs the electronic claim form online. You then receive information about the expense on your phone. Two limits frame the session: it lasts 20 minutes at most and allows only one invoice, after which a new authentication is needed.
This logic, a code shown on one device and read by another that checks online, resembles QR code login, except the direction is reversed: here the patient shows the code.
Why QR code rather than contactless?
Because it works on every smartphone. The Assurance Maladie recommends the QR code for that reason, and points out that NFC contactless is not available on iPhone or on some Android phones.
It is a textbook case of the difference between the two technologies, which we compare more broadly in QR codes vs NFC. A phone screen is, however, a less comfortable surface than paper for an optical reader. A few habits prevent failed reads:
- Turn the brightness up before showing the code, and remove any privacy filter.
- Hold the phone flat and still, a few centimetres from the reader, rather than moving it around to find the angle.
- Watch out for a heavily scratched or cracked screen across the code: error correction has its limits.
Our article on scanning a code from a screen explains where the reflections and moiré patterns that trouble readers come from.
Why doesn't my doctor accept it yet?
Because the app needs equipment not every practice has: billing software approved to the "Addendum 8" specification, with the reading function switched on, plus a QR code or NFC reader. The physical card still exists, and the Assurance Maladie advises keeping it.
Figures from the same presentation show a very uneven rollout. At 27 March 2026, 2.76 million insured people had activated the app, 4.8% of those eligible, and 70,204 professionals were using it, 16.2% of healthcare professionals. By profession, in March 2026, among those billing through SESAM-Vitale:
| Profession | Share of professionals using the app |
|---|---|
| Pharmacists | 85.1% |
| Doctors | 28.1% |
| Dentists | 22.3% |
| Physiotherapists | 6% |
| Midwives | 4.8% |
| Nurses | 1% |
In practice, the pharmacy is where the app is most likely to work, and a nurse's practice is where it is least likely. To find out in advance whether a professional is equipped, the ameli health directory shows it. If your practice also displays its own codes at reception, for bookings or a questionnaire, our advice on QR codes in healthcare helps keep them from being confused with the app reader.
What is due in 2026 and 2027?
The roadmap presented in April 2026 plans several successive versions. For 2026: support for German and Italian identity documents, an activation route for minors, then the app as a low-level identity provider, through FranceConnect or directly.
After 2026, two steps are dated: adding the complementary health insurance identity, billing included, in the first quarter of 2027, and an identity provider at eIDAS substantial level in the second quarter of 2027. That timetable for complementary insurance is later than the November 2025 announcement, which mentioned 2026.
How do you spot a carte Vitale QR code scam?
In the process the Assurance Maladie describes, your phone displays the code and the professional's reader scans it. No step asks you to scan a code received by text message, by post or on a poster to "activate" or "renew" your card.
Activation happens only in the official app, downloaded from your phone's app store, through France Identité or by video. A message inviting you to scan a code to update your carte Vitale belongs to a different family, QR code phishing, which we describe on our quishing page. In France, a text message of that kind can be reported free of charge to 33700.
Frequently asked questions
Without card or app, can the professional still retrieve my entitlements?
Yes, in most cases. The ADRi service, built into 99.9% of billing software according to the Assurance Maladie, retrieves your entitlements from your social security number and date of birth, in particular when there is no carte Vitale.
Will you be able to hand your app over to a relative?
It is planned, with no date set in the April 2026 presentation: the Assurance Maladie announces the option to delegate use of the card to a trusted person for a set period, for example grandparents looking after the children.
Is the practice's reader used for anything besides the app?
Yes. According to the Assurance Maladie, the same QR code or NFC readers also read the complementary insurer's third-party payment certificate and the digital prescription.