SPHN is an example of successful national coordination led jointly with SIB to enable secure sharing and use of patient data for research. The ambitious infrastructure requires close collaboration between Swiss hospitals, research institutions, and policymakers.
Establishing Switzerland’s leadership in personalized medicine
SPHN was launched by the Swiss Confederation in 2017 in response to a key challenge: as data-driven medicine began to transform healthcare, health data were siloed across institutions, systems and legal frameworks – which limited their use for research.
The network makes health data interoperable and shareable for research in Switzerland, as a national data infrastructure under the responsibility of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) in collaboration with SIB. SPHN supports researchers throughout all phases of their projects: from identifying relevant data and meeting legal requirements to providing a secure environment for data analysis. It also promotes the quality of clinical data by enabling hospitals to make their data interoperable in line with national and international standards.
Enabling medical innovation for personalized healthcare
Since its launch in 2017, the Swiss Personalized Health Network has established pioneering data infrastructure that makes high-quality patient data discoverable and securely available for research in Switzerland. With researchers and clinicians involved across the country – and consented data available from hundreds of thousands of patients – SPHN enables new scientific findings that can improve healthcare through innovations in personalized medicine, from paediatrics to cancer.
Establishing Switzerland’s leadership in personalized medicine
SPHN was launched by the Swiss Confederation in 2017 in response to a key challenge: as data-driven medicine began to transform healthcare, health data were siloed across institutions, systems and legal frameworks – which limited their use for research.
The network makes health data interoperable and shareable for research in Switzerland, as a national data infrastructure under the responsibility of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) in collaboration with SIB. SPHN supports researchers throughout all phases of their projects: from identifying relevant data and meeting legal requirements to providing a secure environment for data analysis. It also promotes the quality of clinical data by enabling hospitals to make their data interoperable in line with national and international standards.
Studies drawing on data from multiple hospitals are more meaningful than those based on a single site. And having high-quality health data at a national level allows us to make predictions, for example, about how dangerous an infectious disease could become
Key figures
5
university hospitals
1,000
researchers and clinicians involved
800,000
patients providing consented data
Coordinating the setup of a nationwide infrastructure
SPHN’s implementation from 2017-2024 was coordinated by SIB and SAMS. Our teams, including the Personalized Health Informatics group in charge of setting up the Data Coordination Centre, played a key role in:
- establishing Swiss-wide standards for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) health data;
- implementing BioMedIT, a national Trusted Research Environment that enables secure exchange and processing of these data for research;
- supporting the establishment of a national legal and ethical framework for regulatory-compliant data exchange.
From setup to sustainable infrastructure through federal support
With the setup phase completed, SPHN is now transitioning to long-term sustainability. The next funding period (2025-2028) focuses on increasing efficiency and further strengthening its infrastructure and expanding its services. This includes supporting a platform for searching and analysing standardized data as well as Swiss FEGA, a national repository for human genomic data.
SAMS is responsible for the mandate during this 2025-2028 federal funding period and will continue the successful collaboration with SIB. Our teams will continue to implement FAIR data standards, coordinate BioMedIT, and provide legal and ethics support.
At the start of the initiative, people questioned why and if we should share health data. Today, everyone focuses on how to accelerate that process even further, always in a responsible way