Swiss Personalized Health Network: a strong signal from the University Hospitals

The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) is a national initiative led by SAMS. It contributes to the development, implementation and validation of a coordinated data infrastructure in order to make health-relevant data usable in Switzerland for research. At the end of 2017, collaboration agreements were concluded with all five University Hospitals.

The overarching goal of the SPHN initiative is to promote personalized health and health research by making health-related data shareable and exchangeable in order to better prevent, diagnose and treat disease. Patient data plays a key role in this endeavor. Building compatible clinical data management systems in research-based health institutions is a prerequisite for the success of the initiative.

One goal of the first SPHN funding period (2017-2020) is to support the five University Hospitals with the development of such data management systems. To this end, each institution receives a contribution of CHF 3 million over a period of three years, provided that the milestones are reached. A corresponding collaboration agreement was concluded at the end of 2017 with all five University Hospitals. With this common collaboration agreement the five participating institutions have sent a strong signal to support the SPHN initiative.

More information on the framework conditions, goals and instruments of the SPHN can be found online at: www.sphn.ch