Swiss government initiative launches FQS medical data system

The Swiss Personalised Health Network (SPHN) has launched its new Federated Query System (FQS), enabling researchers from five university hospitals to share anonymous patient data for research purposes.

The network connects Switzerland’s five university hospitals:

• Lausanne University Hospital
• Geneva University Hospitals
• University Hospital of Bern
• University Hospital of Basel
• University Hospital of Zürich.

The new system will be used to enable authorised researchers from Switzerland’s five university hospitals to conduct feasibility queries for data driven research projects on clinical data.

The FQS will allow researchers to assess whether suitable patient data for specific research questions exists at the five hospitals. The FQS will provide access to more than 70 million data elements from over 450,000 patients who have consented to further use of their data for research purposes.

The platform includes demographic data such as age and gender, diagnosis, procedures, medication, laboratory tests and laboratory test results.

The FQS employs a customised version of Clinerion’s Patient Network Explorer technology, which provides a cloud-based online infrastructure for the system which allows patient data to remain under the control of individual hospitals, while still enabling for queries of data.

“For the first time, it is now possible to run feasibility queries for data-driven research projects over all five university hospitals in Switzerland. This is a major step for SPHN,” said Dr Katrin Crameri, Director for Personalised Health Informatics of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

SPHN is a Swiss government initiative founded in 2017 to develop a secure, interoperable IT infrastructure network for health data and support the development of ‘personalised medicine’ in Switzerland.