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Consent & patient privacy

Fertility records are among the most sensitive in medicine, so Fertiligent treats consent and privacy as first-class parts of the platform — not an afterthought. This page explains how the assistant decides what it can share, and how your team manages a patient's consent.

Verified is not the same as consented​

Before the assistant shares any personal health information over phone or text, two separate things must be true:

  1. Identity is verified — the assistant has confirmed who it's talking to, typically by date of birth (spoken or entered on a keypad).
  2. Consent is on file — the patient has agreed to receive personal health information on that specific channel.

These are deliberately separate. A patient can prove who they are and still not have consented to receive their details by text. In that case the assistant shares nothing private — it sends a short message inviting the patient to give consent instead. This "verified is not consented" rule is enforced on both the phone and SMS channels.

Consent to receive health information by text or by phone can be captured in three ways:

  • From the patient portal. A patient can turn consent on or off themselves, per channel, from their portal profile.
  • By text (double opt-in). A patient can reply CONSENT (or AGREE) to a text to confirm they want to receive health information that way.
  • By staff. A team member can grant or revoke consent for a patient from the patient's record.

Consent is tracked per channel, with a full audit history you can review.

Opting out​

A patient can reply STOP to a text at any time. This does two things: it stops further texts, and it withdraws their consent to receive health information by text. Replying START re-subscribes them to messages but does not automatically restore health-information consent — that has to be given again explicitly. This keeps a patient's most recent choice authoritative.

From a patient's record, staff with the right permission can:

  • see the patient's current consent status for each channel;
  • review the full history of when consent was granted or withdrawn;
  • grant or revoke consent on the patient's behalf.

A separate, broader preference — general consent to electronic communication — is tracked independently and is not the same as express consent to receive health information by phone or text.

Privacy safeguards built in​

  • Grounded answers only. The assistant answers strictly from the materials you've approved and won't invent details. See Knowledge base.
  • A person stays in the loop. Anything the assistant can't safely handle is escalated to your team.
  • Access is audited. Access to protected health information is logged, and emergency ("break-glass") access is time-limited and recorded.

The consent described here — receiving information by phone or text — is separate from clinical treatment consent forms (for example an IVF consent), which have their own signed lifecycle. See Fertility clinical tracking.

Availability​

Consent capture and channel availability are enabled per clinic. Because health information over text depends on identity verification, consent, and the required carrier agreements being in place, text messaging with real patients is rolled out in a controlled way — ask your Fertiligent contact for details.