Ateliers

These interactive sessions take place from 13:00 - 14:35. Each session takes 25 minutes and is repeated three times. This schedule allows you to participate in up to three different Ateliers. Please note that space is limited and kindly reserve your spot via the email you received with the registration.

Atelier 1 - Infections in Intensive Care Units: Lessons learned in the use of clinical routine data in a multi-centre study

By Adrian Egli & Catherine Jutzeler
Using clinical routine data in a multi-centre study presents both opportunities and challenges. In this atelier by the National Data Streams project IICU, we will share the lessons learned from collecting and analyzing intensive care unit data from all five university hospitals in Switzerland. The interactive format encourages participants to exchange experiences and discuss common challenges in handling such data. By fostering this collaborative discussion, the goal is to identify best practices, improve data quality and harmonization, and enhance the overall effectiveness of multi-centre studies. Ultimately, we aim to build a shared understanding of how to overcome obstacles in using clinical routine data for research.

Atelier 2 - Oncology: The Swiss Personalized Oncology National Data Stream (SPO-NDS) and Its Impact on Patient Care

By Olivier Michielin & Bernd Bodenmiller
The Swiss Personalized Oncology National Data Stream (SPO-NDS) is dedicated to advancing precision oncology by delivering FAIR clinical and advanced omics data to molecular tumor boards at both local and national levels. This initiative offers groundbreaking decision support for personalized therapies. In this session, we will introduce you to the project’s core objectives and anticipated outcomes. We will also guide you through the journey of a typical patient within the study, exploring how their personalized omics data is analyzed and discussed at a molecular tumor board, ultimately leading to treatment recommendations with a direct impact on patient care.

Atelier 3 - Pediatrics: A poster walk exploring insights of SwissPedHealth, a national pediatric data stream

By SwissPedHealth consortium members
SwissPedHealth is a national pediatric data stream that aims to securely leverage daily routine data from children’s hospitals for research and analysis, ultimately improving pediatric healthcare. Through this atelier in form of a poster walk you will be able to interact with our team and discover the highlights of SwissPedHealth. These will include key infrastructure and governance aspects, the relevance for child health of our nested projects on obesity, cancer, lung function and antibiotics, exciting preliminary findings from the lighthouse project on the use of AI and bioinformatic pipelines to improve rare diseases detection, and news from our work together with families through focus groups and interviews on bioethical aspects.

Atelier 4 - Low Value of Care: Unlocking research potential with LUCID NDS data - a participatory approach

By Marie Méan, Oksana Riba and LUCID team members
LUCID (Low valUe of Care in Medical hospitalIzeD patients) is a pioneering National Data Stream project aimed at studying the quality of care in Swiss university hospitals. By integrating routine hospital data with patient-reported outcomes (PROs), LUCID creates a dynamic and comprehensive dataset ripe for innovative research on quality of care. This atelier invites you to collaborate in identifying novel research opportunities. How can we leverage this rich data to revolutionize healthcare delivery, optimize resource allocation, avoid waste of care or personalize treatment strategies?

Atelier 5 - Genomics: No room for precision medicine in the land of precision watches? Is Switzerland shunning genomic medicine?

By Didier Trono
Advanced genomics stands to revolutionize health management and the practice of medicine by identifying individual genetic risks,  predicting a person’s response to drugs, allowing the stratification of patients notably in cancer therapy, and many other applications  with a profound impact on the prevention, diagnostic and treatment of diseases. Countries all over the world have started sequencing hundreds of thousands of individual genomes to serve as basis for their personalized health/precision medicine programs, already making a number of health-relevant discoveries as a by-product. Switzerland still lacks a coherent, sustainable, government-supported plan to join this effort. Is it a matter of concern?

Atelier 6 - Data Governance: Putting a price tag on data

By Julia Maurer & ELSI Team
High-quality data infrastructures are critical to advancing research, but they come at a significant cost - requiring labor-intensive operations and highly skilled personnel. Yet it is still unclear what sustainable business models could drive data infrastructures to reduce their reliance on public funding. For Swiss institutions, the concept of treating data as a 'product' available as a fee-based service, is a relatively new idea that comes with a host of unresolved questions. In this session, we invite participants to explore the ethical, legal and governance-related implications of this model. Key questions we will address include: Is it part of the research mandate of a (university) hospital to provide data services for external researchers? Can data providing hospitals sufficiently ensure patients’ privacy and public trust in such a setting? What are the implications of such an approach for researchers, industry partners, hospital representatives  and patients?

Atelier 7 - Ethics: Ethical challenges in genomic research

By Susanne Driessen
The sharing of genomic data across institutional and national borders offers unprecedented opportunities to advance personalized medicine. However, it also poses significant ethical and societal challenges, particularly with regard to consent, privacy, and public engagement. Internationally, these challenges have been discussed by various institutions, but in Switzerland a nationally harmonized understanding and solutions are still lacking. This session will introduce participants to an ethical framework developed by the SPHN ELSI advisory group to facilitate a consistent approach to practical ethical issues in genomic data sharing in Switzerland. Participants will share experiences and gain a clearer understanding of ethical, legal and social issues in generating and sharing of genomic data.

Short Talks

Short-Talk Session 1, 13:00 - 13:25

Data Integration Across Clinical Routine Data, Omics Data, and Beyond: The SPHN Semantic Interoperability Framework

By Sabine Oesterle
This talk will delve into the crucial role of data integration in advancing healthcare research, with a focus on harmonizing diverse datasets such as clinical routine data, omics data (genomics, proteomics, etc.), and other biomedical sources. We will introduce the SPHN Schema, a comprehensive blueprint that ensures seamless semantic interoperability across various domains. The presentation will also highlight the SPHN Toolstack, a powerful suite of tools designed to facilitate the creation of knowledge graphs, which enhance data connectivity, enable complex queries, and drive discovery.

Integration, Operation and Usage of the SPHN Toolset in a University Hospital

By Patrick Hirschi
Showcase the integration, operation, and practical usage of the SPHN toolset within the University Hospital of Zurich. We'll explore how the toolset was seamlessly integrated into our existing systems, the challenges we encountered, and discuss the overall impact of SPHN on our data ecosystem.

Short-Talk Session 2, 13:35 - 14:00

BioMedIT Network: Swiss federation of Trusted Research Environments for sensitive data management

By Shubham Kapoor
In this talk, we explore the BioMedIT network, Switzerland’s secure IT infrastructure for responsible processing of sensitive data. Coordinated by SPHN-DCC, the BioMedIT network extends across three legally independent scientific IT platforms at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, and the University of Lausanne. Launched in 2017 as an integral part of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) initiative, the network currently supports over 60 national and international health-related research projects, spanning areas such as infection prediction and precision oncology.

Setting up a Swiss federated European Genome-Phenome Archive (fEGA)

Mark Ibberson
Federated European Genome-phenome Archive (FEGA) is a secure, federated infrastructure that enables the sharing, management, and analysis of sensitive genomic and phenotypic data across multiple European nodes, while maintaining strict compliance with GDPR data protection regulations. Each country hosts its own node, allowing data to remain under national jurisdiction while still participating in pan-European research efforts. This talk will focus on the process of setting up a FEGA node for Switzerland, covering the goals, current status and challenges in this ambitious project supporting Switzerland’s active role in federated genomic research across Europe.

Short-Talk Session 3, 14:10 - 14:35

From Spins to Pictures to Digital Organs - the PHRT Deep Data Collection Initiative

Sebastian Kozerke
In this presentation, we will highlight the value and importance of deep imaging data collected in the normal population. We will show the role of MR image-guided digital organs for inferring sub-voxel information from in-vivo measurements and will sketch a future scenario of patient-specific in-silico diagnostics and prediction.

SMOC - An Engine for Multi-Omics Data Generation in Personalized Health

Sandra Goetze
Ever wondered how our bodies function, how diseases arise, and how we might tailor treatments to each individual's unique needs? The ETH PHRT Swiss Multi-omics Center (SMOC) is on a mission to unravel these intricate biological mysteries and pave the way for a healthier future.

Dr. Martina Hirayama
Head of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) at Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

Martina Hirayama studied Chemistry at ETH Zurich, the University of Fribourg, and Imperial College London, earning a doctorate in technical sciences from ETH Zurich, where she also pursued postgraduate studies in Business Economics. She led the Polymer Chemistry Group at ETH Zurich and co-founded a start-up in coating technologies, serving as CEO until 2008. At ZHAW, she lectured in Industrial Chemistry, developed the field of polymer materials, and led the Institute of Materials and Process Engineering. From 2011 to 2018, she was Director of the ZHAW School of Engineering and held leadership roles in the Federal Institute of Metrology, Innosuisse, and other key organizations. Since 2019 Prof. Dr. Hirayama has been head of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation.

Prof. Russ B. Altman
Stanford University

Russ Biagio Altman is the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, Biomedical Data Science and (by courtesy) Computer Science) and past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing (AI, data science and informatics) to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels. Russ Biagio Altman is the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, Biomedical Data Science and (by courtesy) Computer Science) and past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing (AI, data science and informatics) to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels. Russ is also the chairperson of the SPHN International Advisory Board.

Prof. Antoine Geissbühler 
University of Geneva 

Anne Lévy
Director-General of the Federal Office of Public Health FOPH (since 2020)

Lic. sc. pol. degree in political science (University of Lausanne), Executive MBA (University of Fribourg)

Anne Lévy coordinates the FOPH’s business with the FDHA’s planning. She assures representation of the FOPH, and in some cases the FDHA, in interdepartmental working groups and on parliamentary committees and international bodies. In addition, Anne Lévy heads and plans healthcare reform projects at the national level. 

2015–20 CEO, University Psychiatric Clinics, Basel | 2009–15 Head of Health Protection, Basel-Stadt Department of Health, Basel | 2004–09 Head of Alcohol and Tobacco Section, FOPH, Bern| 2003–04 Technical Assistant to the Assistant Director and Head of the Main Unit Substance Abuse and AIDS, FOPH, Bern | 2001–03 Research Associate, Head of Coordination and Service Platform for Addiction, FOPH, Bern | 2000 Project Manager, United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), New York

Dr. med. Katharina Gasser
General Manager of Roche Pharma Switzerland

Dr. Katrin Crameri
Co-head DigiSanté

Federal Department of Home Affairs and co-head of the Digital Transformation division at the Federal Office of Public Health since June 2024. She studied molecular biology in Tübingen, Berlin, and New York, holds a PhD in neuroscience and a Master of Public Health. From 2019 to May 2024, Katrin served as Director of Personalized Health Informatics at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, where she led SPHN’s Data Coordination Center and the BioMedIT project. She is passionate about driving digital transformation in healthcare and dedicated to advancing better research for better health.

Location

The symposium takes place at the Kursaal Bern:

Kursaal Bern
Kornhausstrasse 3
3001 Bern

Arrival by public transport: Take tram line no 9 from Bern train station (Kante B, direction of Bern Wankdorf) to the station Kursaal.
Arrival by car: Use "Kursaal Parking" as the address for your navigation system / Google Maps. The hotel's own underground parking garage provides 240 parking spaces.

Contact

For any questions concerning the symposium please contact:

events@dataforhealth.ch

To Learn more about the organisators:

Swiss Personalized Health Network: sphn.ch
Personalized Health and Related Technologies: sfa-phrt.ch