Retrievant co-founder and CEO Élodie Moreau delivered the opening keynote at Health Data Paris on 4 June. The talk, titled 'Agents with a chaperone', argued that autonomous software acting on a patient's behalf will be tolerated exactly as long as it is honest about what it is and bounded by what the patient agreed to.
Three claims from the talk. First, consent should be the technical boundary, not a policy document: an agent should be physically unable to request a record type or date range the patient did not authorise. Second, every automated call should open with a disclosure, and the completion-rate cost of doing so is negative once providers have met the agent more than once. Third, the escalation path to a human is a product feature, not a failure mode, and should be designed and measured as carefully as the agent itself.
The talk drew on eighteen months of Retrievant's production data, including the disclosure experiment previously written up in our journal, and on transcripts of calls where receptionists asked the agent directly whether it was a person.
Slides and a transcript are available on request to hello@retrievant.example. A recording will be published by the conference organisers.
About Retrievant
Retrievant is an AI retrieval company headquartered in Paris. Its agents retrieve a patient's complete medical history on the patient's authorisation and deliver one verified, source-linked record to legal, insurance, research, provider and digital-health organisations. Retrievant is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and HDS certified.