Improving clinical data capture: a leap forward for Swiss healthcare through open innovation
The Digital Health Nation Innovation Booster, powered by Innosuisse, is a catalyst for collaborative health innovation in Switzerland.
Digital Health Nation program is lead by DayOne Healthtech Innovation since 2022 and is dedicated to advancing Swiss healthcare by transforming ideas into impactful solutions for patients and healthcare professionals. This is achieved through a collaborative approach, bringing together experts, patients, academia and entrepreneurs. The program is supported by the biggest Swiss public-private consortium in healthcare. The consortium plays an important role in fostering open innovation, by creating a collaborative ecosystem where a broad range of stakeholders can share knowledge, resources and expertise.
Discover the latest Open Innovation Challenge “Improving clinical data capture for better healthcare outcomes”:
A national call to action for healthcare innovators
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:
- Structure needs design: Clinicians resist rigid templates. Interfaces must be elegant, intuitive, and reduce – not add – to their workload.
- Collaboration is key: Successful solutions involved clinicians and patients from day one – not just as test users but as co-designers.
- Open standards enable futureproofing: openEHR is not just a tech layer – it’s a foundational enabler of interoperable, reusable clinical data.
The challenge: bridging fragmented data systems
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.
Spotlight on the shortlisted Challenge projects
Six outstanding teams were selected to move from the idea to MVP stage, each offering a unique approach to data capture, usability and interoperability through openEHR:
Anamedi improves data capture and quality through ambient AI in clinical settings, while reducing clinicians’ manual documentation time. Its solution captures doctor-patient conversations using speech-to-text, fine-tuned for Swiss German and medical terminology, and can be deployed in hospitals, GP offices and psychotherapy practices. Specialized models ensure accurate transcription and terminology across the field. It is compatible with most common healthcare IT standards, including openEHR.
This is an initiative of the Institute for Medical Informatics at the Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH). The team is examining whether structured and intuitive digital symptom documentation by patients could lead to a more complete and reliable patient history, which healthcare professionals can assess during and in preparation for consultations. The project involves designing a conceptual mobile application and openEHR modelling of symptom data and initially focuses on the capture of pain symptoms.
This is a comprehensive openEHR-based clinical applications portfolio that scales across different healthcare environments and professional groups. Lifecare Clinical Modules empower healthcare professionals with unified, modular software built on open standards. Clinical data is stored in a vendor-neutral openEHR format, enabling seamless interoperability, reuse and integration across systems so that clinicians can act on patient data efficiently.
These are digital assessments of movement impairment to enhance data quality, increase data density, and automate workflows. Building upon observation of clinical workflows, Healthcore is developing frontends that guide the assessor through the data collection process. They incorporate advanced biomechanical modelling tools that enable accurate kinematic analysis, and display the results on data dashboards in near-time.
Automating clinical score calculation using EHR data to reduce errors, save time, and improve diagnostics. RADICAL automates diagnostic score calculations within hospital workflows using openEHR standards. It also reduces manual effort, improves accuracy, and enables structured, interoperable data capture, laying the foundation for scalable, machine learning-ready diagnostics algorithms.
This is a webapp by ALPINA+SANA for nutritionists to view patient meal data, stored in openEHR format; data comes from an AI-based food tracking system. The AI-powered food tracking replaces inaccurate, manual “plate protocols” with automated, next-day nutrition data in OpenEHR format – giving nutritionists a time-saving, precise overview of all patients, including those not yet flagged for malnutrition.
These solutions align with real clinical workflows, minimize documentation fatigue, and demonstrate scalable models for digital transformation in healthcare.
Looking beyond borders: insights from Catalonia’s digital health transformation
The Innovation Booster Challenge not only brought together Swiss innovators but also connected them with international perspectives. At the Open Innovation Day in Basel, held as part of the Challenge program, participants had the opportunity to hear from Xabier Michelena Vegas, a leading figure in digital health strategy .
In his keynote address, “The Catalan Digital Health Strategy: Learnings and Future Directions,” Xabier shared his journey toward a digitally integrated healthcare system, rooted in the Open Platform paradigm and built on open standards like openEHR.
Reflecting on the event, Xabier emphasized the urgency and shared responsibility of digital transformation in healthcare:
- The time to act was yesterday – but we remain committed to a Digital Health Strategy rooted in the Open Platform paradigm.
- This transformation must be collaborative and multidisciplinary in every sense.
- Patients and healthcare providers deserve better ways to deliver and experience care.
- The information systems of the future must be designed starting from clinical processes and knowledge.
- The only way to scale innovation is by embracing open standards and open architectures that can be reused across different settings.
His message echoed the core values of the Innovation Booster Challenge: that impactful, future-ready healthcare systems depend not only on technology, but on openness, collaboration, and clinical-centered design.
By bridging local efforts with global experiences, the program underlined that Switzerland is part of a broader movement toward standardized, patient-centric health innovation – where shared challenges and insights drive collective progress.
This Swiss Challenge will have a broader impact
By advancing clinical data standardization through real-world pilots, at institutions like the University Hospital Basel, this Challenge has demonstrated that innovation in healthcare is not just about technology – it’s about collaboration. Hospitals, startups, researchers, and patients came together to co-design practical solutions grounded in clinical reality. This kind of hands-on, cross-functional teamwork is essential for driving sustainable digital transformation.
The Challenge also highlighted the critical role of programs like the Digital Health Nation Innovation Booster in creating structured spaces for experimentation, iteration, and validation. By fostering open collaboration across disciplines and institutions, these initiatives accelerate the translation of ideas into actionable, scalable solutions.
The success of this Challenge reinforces that Switzerland’s future in digital health depends not only on cutting-edge tools like openEHR, but on the strength of its partnerships – between public institutions and private actors, between clinical experts and technologists, and between national efforts and local innovation ecosystems.
Read more about openEHR and its impact: openEHR.org
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Yana Yoncheva
Manager Open Innovation – DayOne
