SPHN acts as a trusted partner between hospitals and private companies
A new collaboration framework allows private partners to transform Swiss health data into actionable insights while preserving patients’ privacy. The first pilot project of its kind examines risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
14.10.2025
Hospitals in the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) host a wealth of real-world data from over 700’000 patients who have given their general consent. With the new framework for public-private collaborations, pharmaceutical companies can answer simple research questions without accessing personal health data. These results can be translated into solutions for patients and, as such, further improve healthcare.
As the first project of this kind, SPHN has partnered with Novartis along with the Cantonal Hospital Aarau and the University Hospital Basel. The framework for this collaboration has been elaborated by SPHN with legal expertise from the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
SPHN analyzes the data on behalf of the partner
The process for this collaboration is as simple as it is privacy-preserving: Novartis has submitted a research question concerning a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The hospitals transferred the necessary data in anonymized form to the Trusted Research Environment BioMedIT, where SPHN’s Coordination Center conducted the analysis and delivered aggregated results back to Novartis. No data is shared with the industry partner.
As only summarized results are shared with the company, the project complies with the high ethical standards of SPHN for responsible data sharing and public-private partnerships.
Gaining a better understanding of risk factors for cardiovascular disease
This project looks at lipoprotein, a blood protein that can raise the risk of cardiovascular disease. Measuring its levels in patients may help physicians to take better medication decisions to prevent illness.
With this new setup for collaboration with private partners, SPHN meets a need of both industry and hospitals, and caters to the strong wish of patients to enable research adhering to high ethical and data protection standards. Research with health data will benefit patients and society. As the public-private collaboration framework is now set up, more projects are expected to follow.
Contact us for more information: info@sphn.ch