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.”