Here are some considerations and questions that will accompany you throughout the various presentations.

Introduction

Research support and IT challenges!

CHUV in a few numbers is:
- About 12,000 employees, more than half of whom are caregivers
- Approximately 50,000 hospitalized patients in 2020 with an activity strongly impacted by COVID-19
- Approximately 800 researchers (6.6% of FTEs)

CHUV's main mission is patient care, but research is one of the strategic axes of the hospital. However, research and clinical activities are not always compatible and cannot be managed at the IT level in the same way.

The main mission of the infrastructure team is to deliver and ensure the operation of clinical systems 24 hours a day. Therefore, it is necessary to industrialize the installations and simplify the operational maintenance and monitoring as much as possible. It is natural that the equipment needed to run our clinical applications must be shared as much as possible.

In addition to operational efficiency, mutualization also has advantages in terms of costs and FTEs.

IT support teams therefore have a particular focus on the infrastructure needed for healthcare and cannot support systems that are often specific to a small community. Systems that can in many cases be complex to manage.

As a result, our institution must look at other actors to ensure the provision of an infrastructure that is suitable for researchers while respecting the security constraints imposed by CHUV and its partners.

In addition, some research groups have needs in terms of infrastructure availability and the need to process sensitive data.

These last points are certainly the biggest challenge that CHUV must address in terms of infrastructure provision. And to complicate things a bit more, the research community is not only composed of CHUV employees and requires frequent sharing of data or documents.

Key Questions

• How to ensure a 24 x 7 support of infrastructures not operated by the CHUV
• How to allow researchers to share information while respecting legal constraints
• How to offer research and development environments that are robust, secure, maintainable and flexible for researchers
• How to guide researchers in the choice of infrastructure to avoid uncontrollable deployments that could lead to security breaches.