Highlights
News
Revitalising and Strengthening the SAPhS
22.08.2024 Since 2007, the SAPhS has defined its mission, tasks, and activities. With 13 collective members and only 166 individual members, it seems necessary to broaden its focus. The university education of pharmacists forms the common foundation of all qualified professionals – currently around 9,000 in Switzerland. All of them should be interested in advancing pharmaceutical research and promoting academic excellence within their respective fields.
The full text, presented as a poster at the SPhSD 2024, can be found here.
Where are the bottlenecks in the exchange of health data in Switzerland?
14.03.2024 – The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) coordinates the nationwide development of an infrastructure for the responsible use of health data in research. However, hurdles and bottlenecks repeatedly arise in the exchange of health data. A recently published study highlights, beyond technical aspects, also legal and ethical challenges.
Switzerland has numerous laws, regulations, and guidelines that govern the exchange of health data for research purposes. In addition, SPHN has established important foundations to enable and promote the responsible and ethically correct exchange of health data. These include the SPHN interoperability strategy, a comprehensive contractual framework such as the SPHN Ethical Framework and model agreements. Furthermore, the BioMedIT network provides a secure and trustworthy IT environment for the analysis of sensitive health data.
In practice, however, uncertainties and ambiguities remain, particularly regarding international data exchange or sharing with third parties. The multicenter “National Data Streams,” jointly supported by SPHN and the ETH Program Personalized Health and Related Technologies, have exemplarily highlighted these uncertainties. A recently published study in the Swiss Medical Weekly also provides new insights. The study was conducted under the leadership of Effy Vayena, long-time chair of the SPHN ELSIag, Kelly Ormond, and the Health Ethics and Policy Lab at ETH Zurich, in collaboration with SPHN, the Swiss Biobanking Platform, the Swiss Clinical Trial Organisation, and the Bern Center for Precision Medicine.
The actors interviewed through semi-structured interviews are largely of the opinion that the most complex and confusing aspects of data exchange do not lie in the actual data transfer itself, but in the associated processes and systems. The uncertainties relate to data protection laws, questions of data ownership, and processes for anonymization and pseudonymization. The study concludes that facilitating data access and exchange in Switzerland requires, above all, further legal clarification, education, and investment in sustainable infrastructures.
Read the full article here.
This is how Switzerland can produce essential medicines during crises
15.11.2023 – Many countries want to have essential medicines manufactured again domestically or at least within reach, in order to reduce supply shortages. Some experts, however, say this is not possible. Really not? In recent years, such significant technological advances have been made that a team led by an expert from the SATW wants to demonstrate: It is possible after all. Read the article here.