Health Data Safe Foundation embraces Open-Pryv: building trust, enabling openness, and putting people at the center of health data
The Health Data Safe Foundation is building its data platform on Open-Pryv, and has appointed Pierre-Mikael Legris, Pryv’s founder, as Chief Technology Officer. This is a technology decision and a statement about what kind of organisation HDS intends to be.
Why Pryv.io?
1. Privacy and data sovereignty by design
HDS’s stated purpose is to let individuals “securely collect, manage, control, and share their health data always on their own terms.” That demands a platform built from scratch for privacy, not one where privacy is added later.
Open-Pryv handles consent, auditability, fine-grained permissions, and data lifecycle rules (including deletion). It was designed specifically for personal health data in privacy-sensitive contexts. The UN-endorsed Digital Public Goods Alliance has recognised it as a Digital Public Good.
Pryv is also Swiss-built, developed in the canton of Vaud. That matters for legal accountability and for the trust of users and regulators.
2. Open source
Open-Pryv is fully open source, governed by the Pryv Association. For HDS, this has practical and principled consequences.
On the practical side: the code is auditable by outside experts, which makes it easier to earn trust from users, partners, and regulators. HDS isn’t locked into a single vendor. If needs change, the software can be adapted. And as the open-source community contributes fixes and new features, HDS benefits without having to build everything itself.
On the principled side: a foundation claiming to give people control over their data should itself run on software that isn’t locked behind proprietary walls. Open source makes that consistent.
3. A proven foundation
Building secure personal data infrastructure from scratch takes years and carries real risk. Pryv.io is a mature system that already handles security, audit trails, consent flows, GDPR compliance, and APIs for data ingestion, deletion, and portability. HDS engineers can focus on what’s specific to the mission — women’s health data models, research access governance, patient-facing interfaces — rather than rewriting core data infrastructure.
The regulatory environment in Switzerland, the EU, and beyond also favours a middleware that has already been tested in health settings and is backed by a community of privacy specialists.
4. Bringing in the founder as CTO
Pierre-Mikael Legris built Pryv. Bringing him in as CTO means the technology and the mission stay aligned by design, not managed from a distance. He knows the software, the health data space, and the patient-empowerment problem that HDS is trying to solve. For developers, researchers, and funders, it also signals that HDS is serious about the technical side of what it’s doing.
What this means for you
If you’re a patient or research participant who wants more say over your own health data: you’ll use a platform where privacy is built in from the start. Your data won’t be sold. You choose who can see it, your doctor, a family member, a research project you care about.
If you’re a policymaker, donor, or community leader: this is a platform built in Switzerland, open, legally compliant, and designed to scale across Europe and beyond.
What’s next
We’re starting with women’s health, a field that has been chronically under-researched and where data ownership, privacy, and inclusion are overdue improvements. Open-Pryv powers the platform from day one.
With your support, we plan to expand into other health domains, work with researchers, hospitals, and patient groups, and make it straightforward for people to own and use their health data safely.