Christian Lovis

Christian Lovis is a Swiss board-certified medical doctor in Internal Medicine with special emphasis on emergency medicine and holds a master’s in public health from the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. In parallel to medicine, he studied medical informatics at the University of Geneva, focusing on clinical information systems, electronic patient records, decision support systems, clinical data interoperability and semantics and data analytics, especially around natural language processing.
After his 10 years clinical activities as attending physician in medicine at the university hospitals of Geneva (HUG) and a fellowship at the Puget Sound VA Hospitals in Seattle, Christian led the development and roll-out of the computerized patient record of HUG. In 2002, Christian was awarded a Swiss National Foundation professorship for his work on advanced human-machine based interaction approach mixing advanced data analytics such as natural language understanding, ergonomics and psycho-cognitive aspects. In 2010, Christian founded the division of medical information sciences at HUG which he still chairs as full professor. Since 2019, Christian is the director of the academic department of radiology and medical informatics at the university of Geneva.
Christian is Editor-in-Chief of JMIR Medical Informatics, member of the National Advisory Board of the Swiss Personalized Health Network Initiative, international Advisory Board of the German Medical Informatics Initiative, International Advisory Committee of the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research (NIHP), representative of the Swiss Academy of Medical Science at the European Academies Science Advisory Council(EASAC) for international health data transfer for research.
 
Towards an interoperable digital health landscape bridging the care system and the research

Since the early 2000, I have been working towards building a unified interoperable data-driven framework allowing convergence between the healthcare system and the research community.
I pursued this around three pillars:

• citizen-centred digital health and adoption of HL7 standards such as FHIR, Smart on FHIR;
• shared national patient record and adoption of IHE standards and semantic interoperability;
• secondary usage of health data and building around semantics and formal descriptive languages for data exchanges.

As such, I was the scientific expert driving the work behind the Swiss National Shared Patient Record which led to a Federal Law enforced in 2017 (RS 816.1 June 2015). I played a major role in introducing semantic interoperability in the patient record in Switzerland, notably at bringing Switzerland to get a national licence for SNOMED-CT, building a strategy for LOINC and a national laboratory mapping endorsed by the FAMH (Swiss medical laboratories association). Amongst others, my team built the French and the German languages official starter kit for SNOMED-CT.
Building the convergence between the care system related data flows in a shareable data landscape supporting secondary usage for research and quality assessment has always been one of my goals. As such, I was involved in the early developments of the white papers to support the Swiss Personalized Health network Initiative, and co-authored several reports that contributed to the personalized health initiative in Switzerland (SPHN) for which I lead the clinical semantic interoperability working group of SPHN, and I am the author of the three pillar strategy based on a) semantics; b) RDF as formal descriptive language and c) data models such as OMOP, i2b2, CDISC.