As the country prepares for the end of the TARMED system and the introduction of TARDOC on 1 January 2026, hospitals face a fundamental shift in how outpatient services are documented, coded, and reimbursed. What may seem like an administrative change actually demands a transformation in practice: under the new model, each service is evaluated based on organ system, insurance type, and calendar day. Ensuring every patient encounter aligns with this logic is no longer feasible through manual processes alone.

At Kantonsspital Baselland (KSBL), which operates three sites and serves around 290 000 residents, this challenge is already tangible.

Manual coding and quality control processes are increasingly unsustainable in high-volume outpatient environments. The Innovation Booster Challenge explored how AI could help hospitals validate coding accuracy and documentation quality before billing, preventing reimbursement errors, improving efficiency and saving time.

To explore how AI could support coders and clinicians, the Digital Health Nation Innovation Booster launched an Open Innovation Challenge in spring 2025. The call invited hospitals, startups, data scientists, and software companies to co-develop AI-assisted coding validation tools that support Swiss hospitals during the tariff transition.

From the submitted proposals, four project teams were selected to address coding validation directly, and one team tackled the broader challenge of improving clinical documentation. Each team received CHF 20,000 in non-dilutive funding, access to anonymized ALIS v5 data from KSBL and expert mentoring to refine their solutions across desirability, feasibility and viability.

By the Demo Day in October 2025, every team presented a functional MVP capable of automated analysis and code validation. Approaches included rule-based completeness checks, tariff simulations and dashboard-driven plausibility tools. All teams achieved measurable improvements in coding completeness and showed that automation can operate effectively within Swiss hospital IT environments.

The set up of the Open Innovation Challenge facilitated close collaboration between hospital professionals and innovators, and more importantly showed that open collaboration between hospitals and innovators works even in a highly regulated environment. KSBL’s coding, performance management, and IT departments worked side-by-side with developers, clarifying data definitions, testing algorithms and validating output against real billing logic.

As one participant reflected during Demo Day:

“We didn’t build prototypes in isolation. We built with the people who will actually use them.”

Switzerland’s digital health ecosystem came together earlier this year in response to an open invitation: help solve one of the most persistent problems in clinical practice-fragmented, inefficient data capture. The Open Innovation Challenge “Improving clinical data capture for better healthcare outcomes” encouraged anyone – patients, clinicians, researchers, startups, and developers to work on solutions.

In collaboration with the University Hospital Basel and Personalized Health Basel, the initiative focused on a pressing issue: simplifying and standardizing clinical data capture using openEHR to improve data quality, interoperability and workflow efficiency.

This openness and diversity fuelled truly collaborative innovation, turning an abstract technical issue into a shared, urgent mission: to co-create practical tools that clinicians will actually use, powered by openEHR, and built for real-world settings.

Through public webinars, open Q&As, and an onsite Open Innovation Day, the Challenge built an inclusive community of more than 300 participants from across Switzerland. Out of multiple proposals, only six were selected for further support, reflecting the highly competitive nature of the process and the quality of the ideas submitted.

Lessons from the frontlines of innovation

The Challenge uncovered some critical insights for healthtech innovators:

Swiss healthcare – in common with many other countries – faces a well-known interoperability gap. Most hospitals rely on closed, proprietary information systems, meaning that patient data remains siloed in local servers, printed reports, or inaccessible PDFs. Clinicians often re-enter the same data multiple times, wasting time and increasing the risk of errors occurring. This fragmentation limits care coordination and delays innovation.

With no national mandate for standardization, this Challenge aimed to pioneer scalable, interoperable solutions grounded in openEHR, an open standard for health data exchange.

To ensure clinical relevance and feasibility, selected teams were given access to a real-world clinical testbed at the University Hospital Basel, one of Switzerland’s leading institutions in digital health and a pioneer in openEHR adoption. Teams were able to test and refine their concepts in a real hospital setting, gaining insights from clinicians and building solutions that could integrate into actual workflows.

The Digital Health Nation Innovation Booster, powered by Innosuisse, provided critical backing throughout the process. Each selected project received up to CHF 20,000 in non-dilutive funding to validate, prototype or adapt their solutions. Teams also benefited from access to the University Hospital Basel’s R&D data environment, including the Clinical Data Warehouse.

Beyond financial and technical support, the teams were provided with expert coaching, tailored workshops, and clinical mentorship. This structured innovation environment helped multidisciplinary teams move from concept to clinical relevance with confidence and speed.

DayOne drives digital health innovation by fostering a collaborative environment for startups and scaleups in the Basel Area.

Our three accelerator programs are the core of our mission.

Each one is tailored to address a specific need of the healthcare industry.

The DayOne Tech accelerator supports medtech ventures, the DayOne Health 4.0 accelerator is geared towards international digital health scaleups and the Digital Health Nation Innovation Booster helps startups at the beginning of their journey.

Digital Health Nation aims to foster innovation in Swiss healthcare by transforming ideas into solutions that deliver real value to patients and healthcare professionals. This is done through a collaborative approach involving experts, patients, academia and entrepreneurs.

Project voices

Meet the five startups that the accelerator’s independent selection panel advanced to the third stage based on innovation level, feasibility and potential impact on the Swiss economy and society.

This year’s edition revolved around patient engagement and empowerment, healthcare information quality, access and interoperability, Value-based healthcare (VBHC) and Healthcare Professional (HCP) education and adoption of digital tools.