IICU National Data Stream

Objectives

The IICU National Data Stream is a Swiss multi-institutional initiative to better understand the complex dynamics between intensive care patients, the microorganisms causing infections, and the timing of treatment. 

Building on the Personalized Swiss Sepsis Study (PSSS), it combines clinical, contextual, and pathogen data to improve personalized assessment, characterization, and outcome prediction in patients with infections, taking into account the attending physicians’ clinical reasoning and their resulting patient assessments. 

This knowledge, which goes beyond routine clinical records, substantially improves the quality of the cohort data and forms a globally unique research data repository for the benefit of critically ill patients with infections.

Approach

The project aims to improve personalized assessment, treatment, and outcome prediction for patients with severe infections by combining clinical expertise with data science and AI.

To achieve this, data from over 90,000 intensive care unit (ICU) patients across Switzerland’s five university hospitals have been collected and harmonized. The repository integrates clinical records, continuous patient monitoring, laboratory results, medication data, infection diagnostics, and pathogen omics processed via the Swiss Pathogen Surveillance Platform (SPSP).

This comprehensive, privacy-preserving data resource enables researchers to identify digital biomarkers, predict infection and related outcomes, better understand infection types and treatment responses, and develop more personalized approaches to intensive care.

SDSC Contributions

The data scientists and engineers at the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) have established the technical and data foundations for the IICU National Data Stream, enabling the secure, consistent, and effective use of clinical data across participating hospitals. 

Working closely with clinicians, hospital data teams, and other partners, the SDSC supports the entire data lifecycle, from secure integration and quality assurance to standardization, anonymization, and controlled sharing. This includes harmonizing complex datasets from multiple institutions and aligning them with national standards. 

Specific tasks carried out by the SDSC team include: 

• Data management: decrypting incoming data, onboarding new users to the system, and supporting researchers throughout their work with the data.
• Cross-stakeholder alignment: coordinating with hospital clinical data warehouses, clinicians, and the SPHN Data Coordination Center (DCC).
• Project-specific concept schema design: developing schemas tailored to the project’s needs while ensuring alignment with SPHN concepts and standards.
• Data quality checks: reviewing datasets for inconsistencies, artifacts, and gaps before further analysis.
• Data preprocessing and harmonization: preparing and aligning datasets from different hospitals so that they are consistent and ready for machine learning.
• Data anonymization: applying anonymization methods that protect patient privacy while preserving the analytical value of the data.
• Data sharing: making the data available to third-party users under restricted access to promote reproducible research in the infectious disease area.

These contributions provide the basis for collaborative, reproducible research while safeguarding patient privacy and supporting the development of data-driven approaches to improve infection-related care.

Projected Impact

The IICU National Data Stream aims to improve intensive care for patients with severe infections while delivering broader benefits to society:

• Help reduce mortality: Enable earlier detection of infection and more personalized treatment through AI-driven predictions.
• Preserve antibiotic effectiveness: Support more targeted antibiotic use, reducing the risk of drug-resistant bacteria.
• Advance medical research: Provide third-party researchers with secure access to high-quality ICU data.
• Strengthen Switzerland’s healthcare system: Establish reusable data infrastructure and tools that support future research, innovation, and more effective patient care.

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