Platform project
research areas
timeframe
2025 - 2026
contact
sebastiano.caprara@balgrist.ch
The Digital Platform project of the DSI mobility aims at consolidating the collaboration between community members working on the introduction of disruptive technology into different fields in the society
Concretely, the project leverages ongoing efforts and aims to investigate the acceptance of the data-driven technologies developed in the DSI Infra&Labs and DIZH projects among the users, i.e., healthcare professionals, institutional heads, and regulatory authorities, in order to better understand how the integration of novel technologies in clinical processes should be addressed to maximize benefits of the technologies while being attentive to aspects related to societal acceptance. To this end, the collaborative efforts of DSI Mobility members need to explore responsive analytical approaches in the understanding and evaluation of the developed technologies from the ethical and social perspectives.
This project pursues the development of a secure, collaborative platform for de-identified healthcare data, involving community members from the fields of informatics, medicine, geography, ethics, and law.
Within the DSI Mobility Community, collaboration on a platform development research project has not only led to a preprint publication but has also generated a successful DIZH project application in 2024: the MedTwins Agil.IT project led by Dr. Sebastiano Caprara (Balgrist University Hospital) and Dr. Alberto Huertas (Department of Informatics) at UZH.
Background
This DIZH project represents a significant achievement, building on the DSI Infra&Labs project “Health Data Repository,” which originally began as a clinical-driven initiative at University Hospital Balgrist. Importantly, it leverages existing activities within the Communication Systems Group at the Department of Informatics at UZH, including the AISym4Med EU project, thereby enhancing the technical foundations already in place.
Goals
With this success, the project team will build upon the substantial groundwork and technological advancements realized in both the DSI Infra&Labs and DIZH projects. Specifically, in the next phase they will focus on understanding the acceptance of these data-driven technologies among healthcare professionals, institutional leaders, and regulatory authorities. This approach will enable the identification and integration of key factors for incorporating disruptive technologies into clinical processes, ensuring their benefits are fully realized while thoughtfully addressing aspects of societal acceptance.
To explore these issues comprehensively, Dr. Ning Wang will join the team as a domain expert in societal acceptance. Her involvement will be critical to the project in two areas: 1) contributing domain expertise in societal acceptance of disruptive technologies and 2) supporting resource mobilization for this interdisciplinary research. The clear objective in 2025 is to develop a robust funding proposal, targeting outlets such as the SNSF/Innosuisse BRIDGE Discovery call.
Methods
In the next year, the project’s team will define the collaborative structure to collect the decentralized efforts into a common collaborative framework. This will allow to leverage synergies resulting in concrete project ideas.