BioMedIT is a key component of the Swiss Personalised Health Network initiative. It offers research teams a range of services provided by BioMedIT, SPHN and other related initiatives in order to support their research.
Services for personalised health and other sensitive data
BioMedIT Services
BioMedIT provides several related services to enable research using sensitive personalised health data.
B-spaces are BioMedIT secure research project spaces for analysing and exploiting sensitive health data and are the core BioMedIT service. B-spaces combine infrastructure, encrypted sources of personalised data, registries of containers and applications in a secure way. They can be extended with various additional components or additional infrastructure resources to meet specific research needs.
Federated compute enables researchers to send their algorithms to a computational service and run remote analysis without moving the original data around. This supports cases where data cannot be moved for legal, ethical or practical reasons. BioMedIT has supported the Personal Health Train initiative and ELIXIR Cloud & AAI through this service.
Security consultancy supports BioMedIT nodes and projects running on BioMedIT to maintain appropriate information and IT security while performing their research.
SPHN Services
BioMedIT also offers services from the Swiss Personalised Health Network (SPHN) initiative.
SPHN ELSI consultancy considers the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of Research. It provides support and templates for the legal agreements needed to transfer, process and use sensitive health data, for SPHN and other related research initiatives.
SPHN Feasibility and Findability assist in the planning of research projects. The SPHN Federated Query System lets researchers check the availability of patient data for a specific set of parameters or conditions to ensure it is feasible. It draws on the data collected at hospitals through the General Consent system. The Maelstrom catalogue provides metadata on more than 240 research cohorts worldwide, including the Swiss Cohort Consortia.
The SPHN Semantic Web Framework for FAIR data provides an ecosystem around Semantic Web Technologies to manage and link data in compliance with the FAIR criteria. It includes a semantic framework and guidelines, a core ontology and connection to related terminologies.