The Personalized Health Informatics group (PHI) together with the SPHN Management Office (MO) hosted the representatives of the newly funded projects during the 2nd call on-boarding session. Participants learned about the importance of the research projects advancing the SPHN initiative as well as the BioMedIT project. Additionally, the research project participants were realigned on the funding regulations, as well as the key actions and deliverables expected.
"The success of this pioneering, national initiative strongly depends on your collaboration with other SPHN projects, partner institutions and the SPHN Data Coordination Centre," said Katrin Crameri during her opening presentation.
Adrien Lawrence, Managing Director SPHN and Katrin Crameri, newly appointed Director of the Personalized Health Informatics group (PHI), provided a detailed overview of the SPHN mission and the role of the PHI group managing both, the SPHN Data Coordination Centre (DCC) as well as the BioMedIT project. Additionally, all participants learned about the key activities of the four Working Groups and the Hospital IT Dialogue team.
BioMedIT Project Manager, Martin Fox, explained the harmonization efforts of IT processes and workflows between BioMedIT nodes, linked to Swiss universities. The ultimate goal of these efforts is to allow researchers to transparently share software workflows and collaborate efficiently across the network of competence centers (sciCORE Basel, SIS Zürich, Vital-IT Lausanne). These ICT core facilities already provide scientific user support to SPHN projects and are well equipped for the secure processing of health-related data.
Dorothée Caminity, from the ELSI advisory group, introduced the SPHN Glossary and presented the key legal and ethical principles defined in the SPHN Ethical Framework for Responsible Data Processing. Jörg Willers (USB) shared insights into the recent development of a governance and quality management system for exchange of patient data for research. The advancements of Jörg’s SPHN Infrastructure Development project team is available on the DCC SwitchTube channel.
As a follow-up to this onboarding session, the PHI group will organize a technical alignment meeting with each driver project team, focusing on data flows and specific requirements to advance the current infrastructure.
The lively interaction and keen questions during and after the on-boarding session were testimony of the participants’ passion and eagerness to collaboratively establish mechanisms to enable nationwide interoperability of health-related data.