Digital Resilience has many aspects: Dealing with the loss of your devices, staying up to date in a rapidly developing world, maintaining access to your own applications and data, confidence in your access, fending off and recovering from viruses attacks and more. Together with you, we want to explore all of these perspectives. Together with you, we want to explore all of these perspectives. You can expect more online events leading up to April which will already give you insights into various perspectives. At the congress itself, we will invite experts from academia, industry, media and administrations to expand on their persepctives and we will welcome speakers from our online events to add onto their thoughts. We look forward to a great discussion. You can already save the date in your calendar by pre-registering on it-congress.ch! That way you will be first in line once registration opens up.
On 7 May 2026, the Swiss Informatics Society (SI), in collaboration with the DIDAS Health Working Group, hosted a well‑attended and interactive webinar on secure datastores for digital health, offering participants both strategic perspectives and concrete technical insights. A central highlight of the session was the strong link to the GovTech Hackathon 2026 (28–29 May), which was presented as a key catalyst for turning concepts into tangible prototypes and advancing innovation in person‑centric health data solutions.
The event featured expert speakers including Dr. Peter Janes, EMBA, DIDAS Health Working Group Lead and CEO at Abdagon AG; Michal Jarmolkowicz, CEO of Swiss Safe and Enterprise Security Architect; and Jean‑Pierre Messerli, clinical data modelling expert and entrepreneur, who brought complementary perspectives from research, standards, and real‑world implementation
Dr. Peter Janes outlined how the hackathon builds on earlier success from the 2024 edition—where a prototype for a wallet‑based electronic health record (“EPR 3.0”) won recognition—and explained the submission of three new health‑related challenges, including digital vaccination records, streamlined onboarding using the Swiss EID, and secure datastores. These challenges are embedded in a broader multi‑year roadmap aiming to develop scalable applications and, ultimately, a widely adopted Swiss health app.
From a technical standpoint, Jean-Pierre Messerli explored how interoperability can be achieved through the combined use of HL7 FHIR for data exchange and openEHR for long‑term structured storage, demonstrated through the vaccination data showcase that models complete data lifecycles. Complementing this, Michal Jarmolkowicz highlighted the importance of secure, decentralized architectures, emphasizing a paradigm shift toward user‑controlled data sharing via digital wallets supported by decentralized identity and cryptographic trust infrastructures. Discussions also covered practical challenges such as fragmented data systems, onboarding barriers, and real‑world use cases—including cross‑border healthcare and emergency scenarios—while introducing forward‑looking concepts such as agent‑assisted consent, IoT integration, and AI‑enabled medical insights.
The interactive exchange with participants reinforced both the urgency and the opportunity of reshaping digital health infrastructures, positioning the GovTech Hackathon as an immediate entry point for experimentation and collaboration. The event concluded with a strong call to action for researchers—particularly PhD students—and practitioners to engage in the hackathon and contribute to ongoing initiatives, helping to establish Switzerland as a leader in secure, privacy‑preserving, and interoperable health data ecosystems.
We're going through an interesting point in tech history. There is a clear realization - in Europe and elsewhere - that tech is a fundamental part of our society, both for our individual and collective security and sovereignty. To become digitally resilient, we do not just need this understanding but also the tools to pursue sovereignty. Continuing our Digital Resilience journey, we want to take a closer look at one of the providers of these tools based here in Switzerland: Proton. For this SI Evening Talk on March 12th, we have invited Patricia Egger, Head of Security at Proton, and Adrien Marcone, patent attorney at P&TS, who discussed the advantages of the Proton tool suite, how it can transform our work environment and make us digitally resilient. You can listen to the recording below.
Our second SI Evening Talk on Digital Resilience homed in on the dangers of Ransomware. Ransomware attacks continue to threaten organizations by encrypting critical data and demanding payment for its release. This talk examines the latest trends in ransomware tactics and explores defense strategies that strengthen digital resilience. Building digital resilience ensures that organizations not only prevent breaches but also maintain continuity and recover swiftly when disruptions occur. That’s why understanding these evolving threats is essential for protecting organizational assets and ensuring recovery when attacks occur. To dive into this topic on our Digital Resilience journey, we invited Senior Security Consultant Dimitri Stanojevic from Adnovum to speak at our first SI Evening Talk in 2026, "Digital Hostage-Taking: How Ransomware is Evolving".
For our Kickoff Event, we invited two speakers, Vasily Suvorov and Prof. emer. Ernst Hafen, to start us off. They looked at a conceptual framework for confronting the challenges that come with developing digital resilience and the evolution of the Digital Patient Dossier in Switzerland respectively.
Vasily Suvorov described the many challenges that the increasingly accelerating digitalisation puts in front of us and brought them together in a conceptual framework. How do we deal with our ever-growing reliance on interconnected devices, machines and services? Can we still trust our reality as Generative ML tech becomes more and more realistic and can easily fool our senses? Can we remain in control as we are becoming more and more defined by and dependent on our data, which tends to expand to all aspects of our lives? How can we cope with Cybersecurity challenges made worse by the proliferation of automated fraud technologies? Finally, in times of growing nationalism, how can we ensure Digital Sovereignty but remain open for collaboration?
Bringing a concrete example of digital resilience in action, Prof. emer. Ernst Hafen gave us a look into how a Digital Patient Dossier makes you more digitally resilient. Every day we exchange personal data for free services. Tech companies now know more about us than our doctors, families, or partners. How can we escape this surveillance capitalism and regain our digital sovereignty? The path forward: exercising our right to obtain copies of our own data and storing it securely in personal data accounts. As the primary aggregators of our own information, we could generate more economic value than tech companies currently extract from our fragmented data. By advancing this vision for our most precious and sensitive information, health data, we can transform Switzerland's Electronic Patient Dossier (EPD) into a structured, shared medical record where patients control access. This becomes the foundation for a Swiss Health Data Space enabling anonymized research data use.
You can watch the full recording of the event here:
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