Tune Insight leads a €1.8 Million project for data collaboration in paediatric emergency units

The EPFL spin-off has created a technology able to move past privacy and security issues for data sharing. The project, funded by the Eurostars programme, will involve paediatric units in hospitals in Italy and Switzerland.

Along with Italian and Swiss hospitals from the paediatric emergency research network (PERN), including Insel GruppeSpital in Bern, Switzerland, and University Hospital of Padova, Italy, plus Italian SME DataRiver, Tune Insight, a Lausanne-based start-up, was awarded a 1.8 million euro Eurostars project to securely connect emergency paediatric departments to improve health outcomes of the vulnerable population of acutely ill and injured children across countries and continents.

With the project, Tune Insight and its partners will overcome the lack of large, international, collaborative data pipelines from complex health data. We will tackle this issue through the development, deployment, and validation of a privacy-preserving federated learning platform for patient-centered research in paediatric emergency medicine. It will combine state-of-the-art interoperability techniques to address the challenges inherent to the use of routine electronic medical data, and cutting-edge privacy-preserving technologies to ensure compliance with international data protection regulations, thus developing a robust blueprint for its use in other collaborative clinical research applications.

Dr. Silvia Bressan (University of Padova, Italy), PERN Chair: “We are very excited to collaborate with Tune Insight in this project. Their outstanding work with Swiss hospitals showed that their secure software solution opens a new era for secure data collaborations in healthcare. We are looking forward to applying it to paediatric emergency care across hospitals in different jurisdictions, to advance quality of care for children through advanced analytics and machine learning”.

Once deployed with initial partner hospitals, the solution is meant to be extended to the global Paediatric Emergency Research Network (PERN) that has access to data from over 2 million paediatric emergency presentations per year, to over 100 hospitals, in four of the six World Health Organisation (WHO) regions.

About Tune Insight

Tune Insight is an EPFL spin-off. The start-up recently announced a CHF 3.1 Million fundraising. The company focuses on data collaboration, and uses a technique known as “multi-party homomorphic encryption” to move past privacy and security issues. Effectively, the technology makes it possible to ask questions of another organisation’s data – or multiple organisations’ data – without having to decrypt that data.

➡️ Source: Press Release
📸 Romain Bouyé, Juan Troncoso, Frederic Pont, cofounders of Tune Insight