What does "health data as a common good" mean?
“Health data as a common good” is the phrase at the heart of Health Data Safe’s mission. It gets misread in two opposite directions.
What it is not
It is not collectivisation. A common good does not mean the state, a hospital or a foundation owns your data, or that your record is poured into a shared pool. Each person keeps complete control over their own data; that control is the starting point, not the casualty.
It is also not a market. The opposite failure is treating health data as a commodity: bought, sold, and monetised by whoever holds it, which is how the apps holding the most intimate data about women’s bodies became, structurally, among the least accountable.
What it is
A common good is a resource governed so that it serves everyone’s benefit under rules no single actor can bend. For health data, Health Data Safe’s statutes make that concrete:
- Health data is neither bought nor sold. Neither HDS nor the patients using the platform may trade it.
- Its use is confined to clinical care and ethically approved research. No advertising, no profiling, no resale.
- The Foundation has no profit-making purpose, and its statutes put patients’ fundamental rights and their control over their own data at the centre.
- Two principles guide the governance: subsidiarity (decisions are made at the most local level capable of handling them, and the patient is the primary decision-maker about their own data) and solidarity (the infrastructure serves the conditions most in need of evidence, not only the largest commercial markets).
Why statutes rather than promises
These commitments are not internal policies that a board might revise. They are written into the statutes of a Swiss foundation, and Swiss foundation law makes that mission permanent: a foundation is bound to its stated purpose under federal supervision. A company can pivot; this legal form cannot.
The practical consequence: an individual contribution (your consented data) can serve the collective good (research, better care) without ever leaving your control or becoming someone’s asset. Individual good, collective good, and the common good of society are pursued together rather than traded against each other.
Read the essential articles of our statutes, or see who owns your health data.