From Bits to Breakthroughs 2026
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4th National Event on Data-Driven Approaches in Health and Medicine
Friday, 13 November | PROGR, Bern
Welcome coffee from 09:00 | Program starts at 10:00 | Apéro Riche from 16:30
Join us for the 4th national From Bits to Breakthroughs event, bringing together experts from medicine, data science, biomedical research, and health data semantics for an intensive, hands-on study-a-thon.
A study-a-thon is a focused open-science collaboration designed to turn clearly defined research questions into concrete, reproducible outcomes within a short timeframe. Participants work in interdisciplinary teams, combining domain expertise, data, methods, and shared standards to address a common challenge.
This year's focus: Temporal Representation
When does disease actually begin?
In biomedical data and machine learning, the answer is rarely straightforward.
In sepsis, conclusions may change depending on whether a model is anchored to T0, T1, or T2. After surgery, the intervention itself provides a precise timestamp, while the true onset of an infection or complication may be much harder to capture. In oncology, disease can evolve over months or years, with different timelines emerging from clinical, molecular, and patient perspectives.
These are examples of a broader challenge: how we represent time can fundamentally shape the questions we ask, the models we build, and the conclusions we draw.
Temporal representation remains a shared methodological challenge across biomedical domains. Baseline definitions differ between cohorts, clinically meaningful events are often incompletely documented in routine data, and disease trajectories unfold across very different timescales.
This study-a-thon will bring the community together to explore these challenges through clearly defined use cases, interdisciplinary teamwork, and practical experimentation. The goal is not only to discuss the problem, but to develop tangible and reproducible outputs that can inform future research and data-driven healthcare applications.
Who should join?
The event is designed for professionals and researchers working across:
- medicine and clinical research
- biomedical and health data science
- machine learning and AI
- health data standards and semantics
- epidemiology and real-world data
- open and reproducible science
Whether you bring clinical expertise, methodological experience, data knowledge, or a fresh perspective, your contribution can help the community move from shared challenges to practical solutions.
What to expect
The day starts with welcome coffee and networking from 09:00, followed by the official program at 10:00.
Most of the day will be dedicated to outcome-oriented collaborative work, with participants joining interdisciplinary groups around selected design and research challenges. You will also have the opportunity to meet and connect with the OHDSI National Node Switzerland community and exchange with peers across the Swiss health data ecosystem.
We will conclude with an Apéro Riche from 16:00 to 18:00, offering time to exchange results, make new connections, and explore opportunities for continued collaboration.
Additional materials will be shared with registered participants ahead of the event to support preparation and make the study-a-thon as productive as possible.
Organisers
Founded by
- Olga Endrich — Head of Health Information Management, Inselspital
- Catherine Jutzeler — Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science, ETH Zurich
Co-organised with
- Oksana Riba Grognuz - Head of Software Infrastructure Technology, Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC)