Health Data Safe Foundation embraces Open-Pryv: building trust, enabling openness, and putting people at the center of health data

The Health Data Safe (HDS) Foundation is taking a bold step: to underpin its data platform using Open-Pryv software, and to appoint Pierre‑Mikael Legris, the founder of Pryv, as Chief Technology Officer for Health Data Safe. This decision signals not only a pragmatic choice of technology, but a clear statement of values about openness, sovereignty, trust, and the alignment of mission and infrastructure.

Why Pryv.io?

1. Mission alignment: privacy, sovereignty, and trust by design

Health Data Safe’s declared mission is to enable individuals to “securely collect, manage, control, and share their health data always on their own terms.” This positioning demands a platform that is, from the ground up, privacy‑friendly, transparent, and respectful of data sovereignty.

Recognized as Digital-Public-Good by DPG Alliance, a UN-endorsed initiative, Open-Pryv is precisely a middleware built for that purpose: it handles not only data storage and access, but also consent, auditability, fine‑grained permissions, and lifecycle rules (e.g. deletion). Because it was conceived to manage personal data (especially health data) in a privacy‑centric way, it sits naturally under HDS’s umbrella.

Moreover, Pryv is Swiss‑based, developed in the canton of Vaud, reflecting local values of trust, data responsibility, and reliability. That local anchoring also helps HDS in maintaining accountability to Swiss legal and ethical norms.

2. Open Source as the foundational bet

One of the key motivations for HDS adopting Open-Pryv is that the software is now fully open source, under the governance of the Pryv Association.

For HDS, this opens up a number of opportunities:

• Transparency and auditability: With open source, the code is inspectable, auditable, and open for scrutiny by external experts, increasing trust among users, partners, regulators, and the community.

• Long‑term independence: HDS is not locked into a proprietary vendor. If future constraints or strategic needs shift, HDS can evolve, fork, or adapt the software as needed (within community norms).

• Community leverage: As the open software evolves, HDS can benefit from contributions, innovations, bug fixes, extensions, and collective momentum. Supporting the general open source ecosystem makes HDS less of an isolated silo and more of a node in a broader collaborative fabric.

• Moral consistency: A mission in health data that claims to empower individuals is better served by software that itself is not locked down behind proprietary walls.

Thus, by backing Pryv’s open source development, HDS is not just picking an off‑the‑shelf tool it is investing in the very infrastructure of trust and shared progress.

3. Speed, reliability, and regulatory confidence

Building a robust, secure personal data management stack from scratch is arduous. By choosing Pryv.io, HDS gains access to a mature, battle-tested middleware that handles many of the difficult foundational problems: security, audit trails, consent flows, interoperability, compliance with GDPR/similar regimes, APIs for data ingestion, deletion, portability, etc.

This allows HDS engineers to focus on mission‑specific logic: women’s health data models, community participation features, research access governance, UI/UX, analytics rather than reinventing core privacy plumbing.

Also, given the regulatory landscape (in Switzerland, EU, and beyond), having a middleware backed by a community of privacy experts and one already proven in health settings provides legal, security, and risk mitigation assurances.

4. Leadership synergy: bringing in the founder as CTO

Bringing Pierre‑Mikael Legris into HDS as CTO, HDS ensures that technological vision, open source stewardship, and mission goals remain aligned. Legris’s deep domain expertise, his history with Pryv, and his passion for patient empowerment make him a natural bridge between community, technology, and the foundation’s strategy.

It also sends a signal to stakeholders (developers, researchers, funders, regulatory bodies) that HDS takes this seriously; it is not simply contracting a vendor but integrating a visionary technologist into its core leadership.

What this means for you?

If you’re a patient, a participant in a study, or someone who simply wants more control over your health data:

• You’ll be able to use a platform that respects your privacy from the ground up.

• You’ll know that your data isn’t being sold or misused.

• You’ll have the tools to choose whom you share your data with  maybe your doctor, a family member, or a research project you care about.

If you’re a policymaker, donor, or community leader, this is your chance to support a platform that is:

• Built in Switzerland.

• Open, ethical, and legally compliant.

• Ready to scale across Europe and beyond.

What’s next?

We’re starting with a focus on women’s health in a field where better data ownership, privacy, and inclusivity are long overdue. Open-Pryv will power our platform from day one.

But this is just the beginning. With your support, we plan to:

• Expand to other areas of health and wellness.

• Work with researchers, hospitals, and patient groups.

• Make it easy for people everywhere to own and use their health data  safely.

Final thoughts

This partnership with Open-Pryv is a turning point. It’s a commitment to doing things the right way: open, ethical, secure, and centered on people.

At Health Data Safe, we don’t believe health data should be locked away or sold off. We believe it should serve you and together, with Pryv.io, we’re making that possible.

References:

• Open-Pryv

• Pierre-Mikael Legris