A patient’s consent status lives on their record—pending, given, or withdrawn. Recording checks it before it starts. If it’s still pending, the recording doesn’t begin.
That’s a deliberate constraint, not a default we happened to ship with. It would be technically easier to let any clinician start recording against any patient and sort consent out later—plenty of tools work that way. We didn’t want to build something where “later” was doing that much work.
It also matches what CPSM’s own guidance actually asks for: consent has to be real, and it has to come first, not be backfilled after the fact because the conversation’s already been recorded.
One honest limitation: right now the gate only applies once a patient is attached to the recording. You can still start recording before selecting a patient—a clinician forgetting to attach someone mid-visit is a real workflow we didn’t want to break. Closing that gap fully is a bigger change than this one was, and it’s on our list, not swept under the rug.