More information on the collaboration agreements with the five Swiss university hospitals can be found here.

More information about the projects conducted by the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications advisory group (ELSIag) can be found here.

HospFAIR aims at improving quality of shared data and systematizing data standardization and extraction. It calls to enhance and streamline the various processes in the university hospitals, which currently can represent a bottleneck for data interoperability and data delivery, through agile and iterative data production cycles.

Final outcome of HospFAIR are readily deliverable data(sets) of high-quality (according to the SPHN interoperability framework) that are efficiently available, because their production pipeline is systemically implemented at the CDW of the university hospitals.

More information about HospFAIR, its implementation and the timeline can be found here.

Three SPHN Working Groups (WG) are involved in the implementation of HospFAIR:

• WG Data Standards and Quality Control
• WG IT Architecture
• WG RDF

More information about the composition of the WGs can be found here.

The SPHN Connector is a tool developed as part of the SPHN IT architecture strategy led by USZ to facilitate the creation of valid SPHN-compliant graph data based on relational, semantically described data in hospital data platforms.

The Connector is an integral part of the SPHN ecosystem tool stack and services for FAIR data. It interfaces with the DCC Terminology Service, which provides external terminologies such as SNOMED CT, LOINC, and others in a compatible RDF format, and with the SPHN Schema Forge, which generates a project schema, validation rules, and statistical queries from a simple project-specific input.

The SPHN tools and services are listed here. Further information on the SPHN connector will follow soon.

The SPHN Federated Query System (FQS) allows to search for fully anonymized clinical information across all five Swiss university hospitals, while allowing the hospitals to retain full control over their data for feasibility assessments. Researchers can assess whether and where patients or patient data potentially suitable for a specific research question exist at one or several of the Swiss university hospitals.

The FQS Working Group is involved in the local implementation of the FQS.

More information on the FQS can be found here.

The SPHN Cohort Consortium on Maelstrom contributed metadata from Swiss population-based and disease-specific cohorts to the internationally renowned Maelstrom Catalog to increase their discoverability and usability in national and international research projects.

More information about the SPHN Cohort Consortium on Maelstrom can be found here.

The use of genomic data in healthcare is increasing and genome analysis will soon be considered an integral part of advanced healthcare systems. To fully benefit from emerging opportunities in this area, it is crucial to rapidly initiate coordinated efforts:

• to collect data and knowledge about the genetic structure of the Swiss population;
• to develop a streamlined infrastructure supporting collaborative genomic research;
• to provide researchers and clinicians with secure and efficient access to genomic information.

It builds on two complementary pillars:

1. an infrastructure backbone to support and coordinate genomic data generation, processing, and exchange in a scalable and sustainable manner, including a FAIR data repository allowing reuse of data, and
2. a national reference genomic dataset (Genome of Switzerland) to demonstrate the feasibility of genome data production and sharing at scale.

TI4Health is a secure federated discovery and analytics platform that enables a researcher or clinician to securely perform exploratory queries (SQL-like queries for simple statistics) through a user-friendly graphical interface. By relying on a combination of state-of-the-art technologies for information security such as homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation and differential privacy, TI4Health ensures that:

• patients’ individual-level data never leave the security perimeter of each clinical site, hence the hospitals remain in full control of their patients’ data,
• patients’ individual-level data are protected against illegitimate access by unauthorized people,
• aggregate-level data are protected also while in use, as they remain encrypted through the whole process,
• no single authority has to be trusted for the security of the data, and
• re-identification risks are minimized.

The system was originally developed as part of the SPHN- and PHRT-funded projects DPPH (Data Protection in Personalized Health) and MedCo. Currently, it has been industrialized and is now further developed by the company Tune Insight. Using two pilot projects, the SPHN DCC is investigating and documenting the deployment and use of TI4Health (Tune Insight for Health) in specific use-cases in a real-world setting. In order to make the best possible use of synergies and to avoid placing additional workload on the participating parties (i.e. hospitals with regards to data provision and the MedCo/TI4Health development team), the pilots are carried out within the framework of two SPHN projects – the SPHN Driver Project “Swiss Personalized Oncology” and the SPHN Infrastructure Development Project “Swiss BioRef”.