Representing SPHN semantics using HL7 FHIR

Overview

The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) is a national data infrastructure coordinated by Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences and SIB. The goal of SPHN is to facilitate the standardization and harmonization of routine clinical data and promote its secondary use in Switzerland. SPHN's semantic interoperability layer is built around a graph-based SPHN RDF Schema that builds on standardized ontologies and terminologies (e.g., SNOMED CT, LOINC) to achieve fine-grained semantic interoperability across Switzerland's decentralized healthcare system. To make this semantically rich data exchangeable through the widely adopted Health Level 7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, a joint effort by SPHN's FAIR Data Team and Digital Medicine and Interoperability team at Berlin Institute of Health, mapped the full SPHN RDF Schema 2025.1 to FHIR Release 4.

This is the first comprehensive FHIR specification built based on SPHN semantics. Over roughly a year, the project achieved 100% SPHN concept coverage, producing more than 700 FHIR artefacts (179 Logical Models, 129 profiles, 55 extensions, 131 ValueSets) compiled into a draft Implementation Guide.

This work was presented at the Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) 2026. Read more about it at here.