Swiss Personalized Health Network ensures continuity

Since its launch eight years ago, the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) has established the conditions to enable hospitals to efficiently and securely provide patient treatment data for research. In doing so, SPHN facilitates new scientific insights that drive medical innovation and improve healthcare quality, ultimately benefiting society as a whole.

SPHN was started as an initiative by the Swiss government (2017–2024) and was coordinated by the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Its Data Coordination Center (DCC) and the secure BioMedIT infrastructure play key roles in fostering collaboration between hospitals and universities. SPHN ensures the legal and ethical framework for data exchange and has supported over 60 research and infrastructure projects with federal funding.

In doing so, SPHN promotes research with health data across Switzerland based on FAIR principles, ensuring that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

Greater Financial Sustainability Through More Projects

In the last two funding periods, the State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation has funded the SPHN initiative with CHF 68 million and CHF 67 million. Universities and hospitals contributed complementary funds (matching funds) to the projects supported by SPHN. According to the 2025–2028 federal Dispatch on Education, Research, and Innovation, the government plans to provide CHF 20.7 million to support SPHN’s Data Coordination Center over the next four years. This amount will again be complemented by matching funds from institutions.

With this foundation, SPHN will focus on the core components of the network in the coming years, including:

• National coordination of FAIR health data
• Ensuring the legal and ethical framework for data use
• Enabling data interoperability among partners
• Providing a platform for searching and analyzing standardized data
• Operating the BioMedIT infrastructure for secure processing of sensitive data (Trusted Research Environment)
• Establishing a national repository for genetic data
• Providing standardized hospital data (National Data Streams)

With the conclusion of the national SPHN initiative at the end of 2024, direct funding for specific research projects has ended. Moving forward, the SPHN network will focus on making the research data infrastructure even more robust and efficient while strengthening the Data Coordination Center as a competence and service center for FAIR health data.

To ensure long-term financial sustainability, future research projects will contribute to funding data use and infrastructure development through project-based service fees.

Thanks to the data infrastructure built under the SPHN initiative, research projects can now be conducted in a technically secure and regulatory-compliant environment. Hospitals, universities, funding institutions, and patient organizations can support responsible data use by encouraging researchers and clinicians to use this infrastructure. Within the SPHN network, health data is now available in significantly higher quality and is easier to process, which reduces the effort required for research projects. Moving forward, accessing this data will be subject to cost reimbursement, which should be factored in when budgeting for research projects.

The Road Ahead: Integration into the National Data Infrastructure

For the 2025–2028 funding period, SAMS will be responsible for the Data Coordination Center mandate and will continue its successful collaboration with SIB. Close coordination is also planned with DigiSanté, a program led by the Federal Office of Public Health and the Federal Statistical Office to drive the digital transformation of healthcare and quality assurance. Additional projects and mandates for SPHN are currently being explored.

From 2029 onwards, SPHN aims to become an integral part of the national data infrastructure in a new form. A corresponding concept will be developed in the coming years.