Doctolib Connect: Why Europe’s Doctors Are Ditching WhatsApp for This

Imagine a doctor in Amsterdam finishes a difficult surgery. She needs to share post-op photos with a colleague across town. So she does what millions of healthcare professionals do every single day — she opens WhatsApp and sends them.

Convenient? Yes. Safe? Not at all.

Patient photos, clinical notes, lab results — all moving through a consumer app built for holiday snaps and family group chats. No healthcare-grade encryption, compliance safeguards, or audit trail. Just a message, sent and received, with nobody accountable for what happens to that data next.

And this wasn’t a fringe behaviour. It was standard practice. In many hospitals, it still is.

That’s the gap Joost Bruggeman set out to close when he co-founded Siilo in Amsterdam in 2016. His idea was straightforward: build a messaging app that works as smoothly as WhatsApp, but is designed from the ground up for clinical communication.

One that healthcare professionals could actually trust with sensitive patient data.

Turns out, a lot of doctors had been waiting for exactly that.

What Siilo Became — And Why Doctolib Wanted It

By early 2023, Siilo had nearly 500,000 healthcare professionals on the platform, exchanging around 40 million messages every month.

In the UK alone, it had reached 140,000 users across more than 200 NHS trusts — and that number had doubled in under 12 months, as Silicon Canals reported at the time of the acquisition.

That kind of growth in healthcare is unusual. The sector resists new tools. Clinicians are busy, cautious, and quick to abandon anything that adds friction to their day.

Getting them to change how they communicate — something as habitual as messaging — takes a product that genuinely earns its place.

Siilo had done that. And Doctolib was paying attention.

In March 2023, Doctolib acquired Siilo for more than €20 million. The logic was straightforward. Doctolib had spent years building a platform for appointment booking and practice management.

But the layer underneath — how clinicians actually talk to each other about patients in real time — was still a gap. As Contrary Research’s analysis of Doctolib’s M&A strategy notes, the acquisition was a deliberate product expansion move covering market consolidation, geographical reach, and platform depth.

And Siilo closed it cleanly.

The Rebrand: Siilo Is Now Doctolib Connect

For two years after the acquisition, the product continued under the Siilo name. Then on 5 November 2025, it officially became Doctolib Connect. The app updated automatically on users’ phones.

Contacts carried over. Conversations stayed intact. For most people, the transition was invisible — which was the whole idea.

But the rebrand wasn’t just a name change. It was a statement. Doctolib is no longer positioning itself as a booking tool with some added features.

It’s building a full communication and care coordination layer across European healthcare. Doctolib Connect is the clearest signal yet of where that’s heading.

The Numbers Tell You How Fast This Is Growing

Here’s where it gets interesting.

According to Doctolib Connect’s official platform data, the app now has 1.2 million professional users across Europe.

Those users exchange more than 10 million messages every month, across 225,000 care organisations. Since the platform launched, over 1 billion messages have been sent in total — across eight different languages.

Germany is worth highlighting. User numbers there grew 33% year-on-year, with monthly active users up 28%. That mirrors Doctolib’s broader strategy of deepening its foothold in Germany, which the company views as its most important growth market outside France.

What makes these numbers meaningful isn’t just the size — it’s how the growth happened. Healthcare communication tools don’t usually scale quickly.

Adoption is slow, mandates are rare, and professionals push back on anything unfamiliar. Doctolib Connect got here largely through word of mouth. That tells you something real about how well it’s actually working.

Two Products, Two Types of Users

Doctolib Connect isn’t a single product — it’s two, built for different needs.

• The first is Doctolib Connect Messenger. This is the free app, available to any verified healthcare professional. Download it, confirm your credentials, and you’re in. From there, you can message colleagues, share clinical images, make encrypted voice or video calls, and search a directory of 1.2 million verified professionals across Europe.
• The second is Connect for Organisations — the enterprise version. This is a private, closed network built specifically for a hospital, clinic, or regional health network. It includes SCIM API integration, an admin tool, an organisational-level processor agreement, and structured onboarding support. According to the Connect for Organisations product page, Doctolib has built more than 1,000 of these private networks across Europe to date.

The split reflects a genuine difference in what each type of user needs. Individual clinicians want something fast and free they can pick up today.

Hospitals and health systems need governance, oversight, and IT integration. Both are catered for, without one compromising the other.

What the App Actually Does — Feature by Feature

The feature set runs deeper than it looks on the surface.

Secure messaging is the core. Every message, photo, video, and file is end-to-end encrypted — meaning no third party, including Doctolib itself, can access what’s being shared. The same encryption applies to voice and video calls.

The Medical Directory is one of those features that sounds minor until you need it. You can find any verified professional on the network by name, specialty, or location — no phone number or email required. For a clinician who needs a quick opinion from a specialist in another city, that’s a real time-saver.

Patient Cases let you group every conversation, image, and document related to a specific patient into one thread. When the case closes, the whole thing can be exported as a PDF and dropped directly into your EHR. Organised, traceable, and compliant.

The Secure Camera does something simple but important. Photos taken through the app never end up in your personal camera roll. They go straight into Connect’s encrypted media library — completely invisible to iCloud, Google Photos, or any background cloud sync running on your phone.

There’s also a photo editing tool with two functions: a blur option for anonymising identifiable parts of an image, and an arrow overlay for highlighting specific clinical details. Small, but exactly what a clinician needs when sharing wound images or annotating a scan.

Availability status lets you mark yourself as unavailable during a consultation or procedure, with automatic replies to anyone who messages you. No more colleagues chasing you mid-surgery wondering why you’ve gone quiet.

Automatic message deletion clears messages after 30 days by default. If your device is lost or stolen, a remote wipe removes everything in the app immediately.

Masked notifications mean that even with your screen locked, incoming messages don’t display identifiable patient content to anyone nearby.

Taken together, it behaves like WhatsApp — fast, familiar, easy — but built from the start around what clinical communication actually requires.

The Security Architecture Is Genuinely Robust

Security claims in healthcare tech are common. The certifications behind Doctolib Connect are harder to fake.

As detailed on Doctolib Connect’s security standards page, the platform holds ISO 27001 certification, the international standard for information security management. It’s also certified against NEN 7510, 7512, and 7513 — the Dutch healthcare-specific security standards. It’s C5 Type 1 attested under the German BSI framework. And every year, it renews its NHS DSP Toolkit and Information Governance submissions — which is what gets it into NHS trusts across England.

Desktop login requires scanning a QR code from the mobile app. There’s no standalone web login with a username and password, which eliminates a whole category of credential theft risk. The desktop interface also adds an automatic privacy screen that blurs content when you step away.

The mandatory 5-digit PIN at installation isn’t optional. Neither is the backup and restore code generated during registration — that code is what lets you recover your account if you lose your device. Nothing else will do it.

It’s the kind of layered, considered security design that consumer apps will never prioritise, because their users don’t need it. Healthcare professionals do.

Why WhatsApp Keeps Losing Ground Here

You might wonder why hospitals don’t just use WhatsApp Business or Signal and call it done.

The answer is compliance. WhatsApp stores metadata — who you messaged, when, how often — on infrastructure that sits outside European healthcare data regulations. Signal is more private, but it has no medical directory, no patient case management, no EHR export, and no organisational admin layer. It was never designed for clinical use.

Neither platform was. And that’s the core problem. Every workaround a hospital invents to use a consumer app in a clinical setting creates compliance exposure. In healthcare, compliance exposure isn’t just a regulatory inconvenience — it means patient data handled in ways it shouldn’t be.

Doctolib Connect removes the workaround entirely. Every feature in the app exists because someone in a clinical setting needed it. There’s no adapting a generic tool to fit a specialised environment. It was built for that environment from the start.

Who’s Already Using Doctolib Connect App?

The list of institutions using it is a useful signal.

NHS trusts across the UK, Blackrock Clinic and Beaumont Hospital in Ireland, St James’s Hospital, and UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands all use it — all listed among the platform’s trusted institutions across Europe.

These aren’t early adopters taking a punt on a new startup — these are large, well-resourced institutions with strict IT governance standards. They don’t pick up new communication tools casually.

Dr. Wouter Veldhuis, a radiologist at UMC Utrecht, described Connect Web as faster than a phone call, less intrusive, and capable of carrying images in the same message. For radiology — a specialty built around visual interpretation — that combination is exactly right.

Wit-Gele Kruis Oost-Vlaanderen, a large home care organisation in Belgium, shared their experience directly on the Connect platform, calling Doctolib Connect “indispensable” for their teams.

In home care, where nurses and therapists move between patients all day, a tool that keeps teams connected without creating data compliance problems isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s operational infrastructure.

Where It Fits in Doctolib’s Bigger Picture

Take a step back and the strategy becomes obvious.

Doctolib started with appointment booking. Then came practice management, telemedicine, and an AI assistant that summarises consultations in 15 seconds. Further, a virtual phone receptionist for medical practices.

As Sifted’s coverage of Doctolib’s 2024 financials laid out, the company spent €115 million on R&D in 2024 alone — a third of its entire revenue — with most of it going into connecting these layers more tightly.

Now there’s a clinical communication layer used by 1.2 million professionals across Europe.

Each piece connects. A patient books through Doctolib. The doctor uses the practice tools to prepare. The AI assistant handles documentation during the consultation.

Afterwards, the care team coordinates through Doctolib Connect. If a specialist opinion is needed, it happens inside the same network.

That’s not a bundle of separate products. That’s a connected healthcare operating system — and Doctolib Connect is the communication thread running through all of it.

The Bigger Point Worth Sitting With

European healthcare is still deeply fragmented. Different systems, different countries, different workflows. But through all of that, one thing stays constant: clinicians need to talk to each other about patients — quickly, safely, and without generating compliance risk in the process.

That’s what Doctolib Connect is solving. Not through top-down mandates from hospital IT departments, but by building something professionals genuinely want to use — and letting adoption follow.

One billion messages sent. 1.2 million users. 225,000 care organisations. That’s not a tool finding its footing. That’s a tool that has already changed how a significant part of European healthcare communicates day to day.

The WhatsApp era in clinical settings isn’t ending because hospitals are banning it. It’s ending because a better option finally exists.