IDN Health

This focal theme explores the conditions that allow people to stay healthy, get healthier, or recover from illness. The focus is on health promotion, prevention, and health literacy – not as a form of instruction, but as a shared responsibility among individuals, organisations, and policymakers. For health promotion to succeed, knowledge, motivation and agency must be taken as seriously as people’s living conditions, residential environments, social class, work environments, mobility, education and digital access.

Health literacy is more than just information, communication and education. It empowers people to find, understand, interpret and apply health-related information in their daily lives. This is particularly important for non-communicable and chronic diseases, mental health and social inequality. At the same time, research shows that interventions tend to be more successful if they not only address a person’s behaviours, but also change their environment, that is, their workplaces, schools, neighbourhoods, health organisations and digital spaces.

The IDN Health can actively contribute to these endeavours by blending public health approaches with design, technology, research into areas including work, organisations and leadership, and with disciplines such as social work, music, computer science, and business.  

Research in this focal theme aims to develop, test and evaluate approaches and interventions that empower people and organisations to make health-conscious and health-promoting decisions. Most notably, this includes projects on occupational health management, mental health, health literacy, movement, nutrition, social participation, violence and addiction prevention, health-promoting living environments, and health equity. You can find a list of projects on this focal theme here.

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Future-proof healthcare cannot be achieved through increased individual efforts, but better coordination. This focal theme explores interprofessional collaboration, managed care models and the blurred lines between prevention, outpatient and inpatient care, rehabilitation, psychiatry, long-term nursing care, aftercare and palliative care.

Managed care is an organising principle for more complex care conditions. Its cornerstones are shared goals, clearly assigned responsibilities and roles, resilient communication channels, coordinated patient paths and a form of governance where collaboration is not only a requirement, but an actively pursued goal.

Within this focal theme, the IDN Health tests models with the potential to improve the lives of patients and their families and of healthcare professionals alike. This includes coordinated care networks, new role profiles, virtual and hybrid forms of care, clear touch points, shared data foundations, and settings where health and social support are treated as two equally important sides of the same coin. You can find a list of projects on this focal theme here.

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This focal theme is dedicated to studying and developing digital and technical health applications, AI, telemedicine, virtual care, wearables, sensor technology, robotics, data platforms and medical engineering along the entire chain of provision from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, treatment/therapy and care to rehabilitation, aftercare and palliative care.

The central question is not whether a technology is feasible. What matters is whether it can be explained and whether it is safe, accepted, trustworthy, affordable, effective and whether, as such, it can be integrated into real-life work and care processes. That is why digital health and health technologies are also a social issue. People, data, devices, organisations, legal frameworks and professional routines all form a system. If just one element is neglected, even the most technically sophisticated and ideal solution is bound to fail.

For the IDN Health, this means that technology development and critique belong together. AI-based systems, wearables or robotics and other technologies must be developed and evaluated in concert with users, specialists and organisations. Of equal importance are data protection, data quality and use, interoperability, sustainability and clinical evidence.

This focal theme brings together projects in which digital and health-related technologies are not seen as an end in themselves, but as a means to create healthier living environments, more productive organisations, and better care. Human-centred design, evidence-based practice, acceptance, implementation and scalability are particularly important.
You can find a list of projects on this focal theme here.

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This focal theme brings together politics, business, governance and healthcare practice. It focuses on designing high-quality, affordable, accessible, effective healthcare systems. Treating health policy and health economics as a mere series of expenditures does not show the whole picture: health is an investment.

Current discussions about value-based healthcare, managed care, new pricing and funding structures, digital transformation, skills shortage and data-driven management show that health systems are complex, adaptive systems that can be shaped. Interventions in a specific area will affect incentives, roles and distribution effects somewhere else. That is why we need a holistic analysis of policy, institutional realities, economic assessment and healthcare outcomes.

This focal theme is another arena where the HSLU can bring together applied research and social responsibility. We conduct research into, and offer consulting on, funding and compensation models, governance of networks, impact assessment of innovations, socio-economic cost-benefit analysis, strategic organisational transformation, and how we can systematically enhance the role of health in business and policymaking.

The IDN Health provides data-driven and practical foundations for decisions made by policymakers, government agencies, health insurers, healthcare providers, businesses, and NGOs. Sustainable health policy requires actionable evidence, institutional understanding and a clear view on conflicting goals and priorities.  You can find a list of projects on this focal theme here.

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Its relevance for, and impact on, all our focal themes is what makes patient and public involvement a cross-cutting theme. PPI refers to the active involvement and collaboration of people affected, patients and their families, communities and the public in areas such as research, development, and healthcare planning. The aim is to go beyond a merely symbolic consultation and find out who can influence problem-finding, research questions, interventions, assessments and changes.

PPI strengthens the relevance and utility of research by ensuring access, building connections and revealing blind spots. For instance, patients and their families might discover gaps in care provision, undue administrative burdens, communication problems and previously unmet needs before care workers and their employers can. 

But PPI is complex. It requires clearly assigned roles, resources, transparency, an understanding of power dynamics and suitable forms of reflection and evaluation. Not every instance of participation is automatically useful. If managed poorly, participatory processes might raise false expectations or cause disappointment without actually making a difference.

In the IDN Health, the role of PPI is to maximise the human-centredness and impact of research and healthcare. Key elements include co-design, needs assessment with people affected, patient-oriented care models, patient empowerment, promotion of health literacy and self-management, taking relatives’ perspectives into account, community-based approaches and measuring quality of life and care experience.

As a cross-cutting theme, PPI is particularly effective where research can be translated into specific interventions and changes, digital solutions, care models or recommendations for policymakers. It is a powerful reminder for the network that health innovations must not only work for the existing systems, but primarily for the people within them. You can find a list of projects on this a cross-cutting theme here.

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This cross-cutting theme focuses on the gaps and fractures between insight, implementation and effect. Many health innovations are destined to fail not because they are unoriginal or lack theoretical and practical utility, but because of a mismatch with the context, unclear roles and responsibilities, lack of or insufficient funding, poor governance, or insufficient organisational and political readiness for change. Innovation research, implementation science and transformation models can help to systematically close these gaps.

The focus is on theories, models, and frameworks that make contextual factors, barriers, conditions for success, implementation strategies, scaling, and sustainability visible and actionable. This allows us to not just consider projects as a set of interventions, technologies or new care models, but to also shape them as change processes. Doing so may not automatically transform a good prototype into a system innovation, but it allows for the relevant conditions to be tested, which in turn increases its chances of success.

For the IDN Health, this cross-cutting theme is particularly important. After all, many projects in the field involve practice partners, patients and other stakeholder groups and seek to effect change in practice. It helps us to identify suitable frameworks, develop robust effectual logics, measure implementation outcomes and plan the associated knowledge transfer into organisations, policymaking and society.  

Innovation, implementation and transformation require rigorous development and implementation work that should be context-sensitive, evidence-based, participatory, iterative, and politically informed. Especially in a federal healthcare system like Switzerland’s, which is highly differentiated in terms of professional and technical expertise, these cross-cutting themes are not minor issues – they are a prerequisite for effectiveness. You can find a list of projects on this cross-cutting theme here.

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