15 October 2021
With the conclusion of the first funding phase 2017-2020 and the onset of phase II (2021-2024), SPHN had reached a critical turning point: Emphasized by the SPHN International Advisory Board (IAB) at the end of 2020, much progress had been made in enhancing the university hospitals’ clinical data management systems for finding and extracting health data for research projects. The major challenge for the future, however, lies in aligning the individual efforts and strategies to ensure a broad data availability as well as interoperability, and hence scalability and sustainability of the SPHN data ecosystem as a whole.
Similar conclusions were reached from bilateral talks of SPHN leadership with the directors of all five university hospitals (UHs): the aims of SPHN largely overlap with the UH’s internal efforts regarding data management, with the added dimension of nation-wide data interoperability and exchange in SPHN. It thus became evident that, to reach the common goals and shared benefit, a close alignment of the UH’s individual IT strategies between each other and with SPHN is key.
Each UH thus delegated a high-level representative from its ICT department with influence on IT strategy, to enable the alignment of strategies and to ensure implementation within his/her institution. This newly formed SPHN Hospital IT Strategy Alignment Group (HIT-STAG) is chaired by Nicolas Rosat (CHUV) and was kicked-off in January 2021.
It has since worked tirelessly, first on the successful completion of the collaboration agreements 2018-2020 between SPHN and all UHs, and subsequently on elaborating a roadmap for SPHN IT infrastructure at the UHs. This roadmap serves as the basis for the new collaboration agreements that were jointly negotiated with the help of unimedsuisse and that are currently being signed by SPHN and all UH.
HIT-STAG continues to provide advice to SPHN and its members on the infrastructure landscape and roadmap impacting UHs. The group validates that the roadmap provides realistic goals, measures, milestones and deliverables for hospital IT. Its perimeter includes all domains affecting UH IT that are key to reach FAIR (meta-) data within SPHN: data infrastructure, IT architecture and alignment with BioMedIT. HIT-STAG ensures that priorities of IT projects are aligned between UHs, considering feasibility and resources, and closely monitors the implementation of agreed standards and infrastructures within the UH, based on qualitative and quantitative indicators.
More information about the composition of the HIT-STAG can be found here.