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The coordination of care in private practice medicine is a subject of particular attention on the part of national supervisory bodies, as evidenced by the Law of August 13, 2004, which established official guidelines for care and electronically shared medical records. Psychiatrists working in private practice are frequently accused of not being sufficiently involved. This difficulty stems firstly from a divergence, too often neglected, in the theorization of the quality of care between psychiatry and somatic medicine. This divergence absolutely must be taken into account in order to achieve genuine care coordination. The work that has been carried out regarding the implementation of a system of shared patient files makes it possible to better understand how this coordination might then be put into practice. In contrast, the standard care pathways not only deny the concept of quality of care specific to psychiatry, but also assume that psychiatrists should adopt the same standards of quality advocated in somatic medical practice; it is therefore counterproductive in private practice psychiatry.