New healthcare institutions onboarded to SPHN

The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) proudly announces that another six healthcare institutions have been onboarded to the network and are now ready – to various degrees – to provide clinical data for research projects:  

• Cantonal Hospital Aarau (KSA)
• Cantonal Hospital Baden (KSB)
• Cantonal Hospital Lucerne (LUKS)
• Ente Ospedaliero Cantonale (EOC)
• Health Ostschweiz (H-OCH)
• Swiss Cancer Institute (SCI) 

This is a key achievement in the ongoing effort to extend and standardize health data exchange across Swiss healthcare institutions. Each new member of the SPHN network further paves the way to multi-site research and personalized medicine across Switzerland. 

The onboarding process 

To ensure that Swiss health data can be shared and interpreted consistently across institutions and research projects, all institutions mapped internal clinical data to internationally recognized standards - including SNOMED CT and LOINC. The further transformation to the SPHN data exchange format for research was achieved by using the SPHN Connector. 

What data is newly available? 

The newly onboarded hospitals currently provide - to various degrees - a standardized minimal dataset covering demographics, diagnoses, procedures, medications, laboratory tests, as well as vital signs and key clinical scores. With the SPHN Connector, this data can be de-identified and transformed into an interoperable knowledge graph that meets FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles and complies with the SPHN Semantic Interoperability Framework. 

The new connection to the Swiss Cancer Institute (SCI, formerly SAKK) further strengthens oncology research. Now, standardized datasets on Swiss cancer patients can be shared in the SPHN format.  

Secure IT infrastructure by BioMedIT 

The institutions are now also connected to BioMedIT, SPHN’s trusted national IT environment for secure health data research. This ensures that sensitive health data remains protected while allowing researchers to transfer and access harmonized, high-quality datasets for health research. 

A success for the Swiss health research landscape 

The joint efforts succeeded in onboarding several additional institutions to SPHN requiring only limited resources. By enabling healthcare institutions to securely share high-quality, standardized health data, the network paves the way for collaborative, data-driven research and ultimately, for more personalized and effective patient care. This is highly relevant on Switzerland's way to a more connected and interoperable health data ecosystem. 

Read more on the technical implementation in the institutions on the SPHN readthedocs: 

• EOC implementation
• H-OCH implementation
• KSA implementation
• KSB implementation
• LUKS implementation