The Data Coordination Center (DCC) is consolidating the achievements of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) national support initiative. It will continue to coordinate national clinical health data during the 2025 to 2028 funding period. The Confederation launched the SPHN initiative in 2017 to develop personalised medicine in Switzerland; this initial initiative ended in 2024. The SPHN links and analyses large amounts of data so that diagnoses and therapies can be individually adapted to individual patients.
Personalised medicine in Switzerland
Personalised medicine is becoming increasingly important both in Switzerland and globally. Research in this field focuses on developing new drugs, optimising therapies and detecting and identifying rare diseases. Switzerland holds a strong international position in this area of research, thanks to its two federal institutes of technology (ETHZ and EPFL) and a number of university research centres.
Personalised medicine tailors diagnoses and treatments to individual patients by evaluating and linking large volumes of health data. It is an approach that depends on coordinated infrastructure and harmonised data standards.
The Data Coordination Centre DCC (2025–2028)
The Confederation is supporting the DCC – set up as part of the SPHN initiative – with almost CHF 21 million in the 2025–2028 ERI funding period. This amount will be supplemented by funds from the institutions involved in coordinating health data. During the current ERI period, the DCC will consolidate the achievements of the SPHN initiative and continue its activities with regard to the national coordination of FAIR data (i.e. data that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). The Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) is responsible for the SPHN Data Coordination Center mandate and will continue the collaboration established with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) under the SPHN initiative.
The future of data coordination: Strategic fields of action from 2029
SERI has commissioned three experts to identify strategic fields of action for data coordination with a view to developing a coordination framework from 2029 that also exploits synergies with the DigiSanté programme of the Federal Department of Home Affairs.
Background: The national SPHN initiative (2017–2024)
The Confederation launched the SPHN national support initiative to ensure a coordinated approach to data organisation for personalised medicine. From 2017 to 2024, the SPHN focused in particular on building a sustainable data infrastructure so that researchers in Switzerland can have secure access to high-quality data.
The SAMS is tasked with the overall coordination of the SPHN initiative. Responsibility for the DCC and the BioMedIT support infrastructure was then transferred to the SIB as part of the overall mandate.
The costs for the 2017–2024 SPHN initiative were covered by federal funding and matched by funding from the participating institutions. The federal government allocated CHF 68 million to the SPHN for the 2017–2020 ERI funding period and CHF 67 million for the 2021– 2024 period. The SPHN concluded performance agreements with the university hospitals to facilitate the coordination of clinical data. It also awarded funding for various infrastructure development projects.
The SPHN's achievements (2017–2024)
Together with the university hospitals and research centres, the SPHN worked to standardise the organisation of data to ensure that data from various sources can be compared and connected (i.e. made interoperable). It also established data security standards under the BioMedIT label. In addition, the initiative strengthened the national networking of relevant actors and the creation of interfaces with related projects (e.g. biobanks, cohort studies). Finally, the SPHN initiative formulated several recommendations on ethical and regulatory aspects as well as on data protection, as clinical health data contain sensitive information.
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