What does granular consent actually look like?

Most “consent” in digital health is a wall of text with one button. You agree once, to everything, forever, and you never find out what was done under that agreement. Granular consent is the opposite design, and it is precise enough to be described mechanically.

The four properties

Specific. A consent names what data is shared (which streams, not “your data”), with whom, for what purpose, and for how long. On the Health Data Safe platform, when a clinician or researcher requests access, the patient receives a plain-language explanation of exactly that, and approves or declines with a single action.

Revocable. Consent that cannot be withdrawn is not consent; it is a transfer. Every access grant can be revoked at any time, and revocation takes effect on the infrastructure, not in a customer-service queue.

Auditable. Every access event is logged with a timestamp, the accessor’s identity, and the scope of data accessed. The log is invariant: it can be read, never rewritten. You can verify, not just hope, that your terms were honoured.

Structural. The consent is not a policy sitting next to the data; it is the mechanism through which data flows. Each connection is mediated by an Access object: no data flows without a corresponding, time-limited, purpose-specific consent record. The architecture makes it structurally impossible to use data without one.

Why partners want this too

For a clinic or research team, granular consent is not overhead; it is inherited compliance. A partner integrating with HDS inherits the consent management, the invariant audit log (a GDPR Art. 30 register generated on demand), and the portability and erasure rights (GDPR Art. 15/17/20, HIPAA §164.524, nLPD Art. 25/28) as built-in capabilities rather than obligations to implement.

How each patient right under HIPAA, GDPR and the Swiss nLPD maps onto a platform capability is documented publicly in the Compliance Matrix, published in June 2026 on the HDS documentation site.

See it from the patient’s side in How it works, or from the partner’s side in Join as a partner.