FAQ

Compassana is an open ecosystem. It helps network relevant parties across all medical and medical-related fields by means of a digital platform. This networking improves the quality of data-based collaboration and treatment. Patients are given secure access to better orientation within the health care system.

The Compassana patient app helps people manage their health simply and safely. Patients receive low-threshold, personal access to the healthcare system, medical services and tools. As part of the Compassana ecosystem, this allows them to work with their healthcare specialists to design a treatment path that best suits their needs. Since spring 2023, the Compassana app has been tested in selected Medbase practices and will be publicly available in the second quarter of the year.  

Compassana is operated by Bluespace Ventures AG, which was founded in 2020 by Medbase and Hirslanden. Groupe Mutuel, Helsana and Swica joined in 2022, and the LUKS Group joined at the beginning of 2023. These shareholders finance and secure Compassana’s development and make sure that the ecosystem continues to evolve systematically.

Among the many definitions available, there’s one that’s very accurate: 

‘Business ecosystems are a form of organisation that enables coordinated collaboration between people who are both independent and business partners, based on shared value propositions, to add value.’
Müller-Stewens, G. & Stonig, J. 2019. Business ecosystems and platforms: moving towards mutual understanding. The Company, 73(4): 374.380 

According to these principles, we see Compassana as an ecosystem involving various players from the healthcare sector who want to pursue their goal of cross-sectorally linked and digitally enabled collaboration between service providers, insurance companies and patients, and thus want to achieve improved integrated and consistent healthcare services.  

Using sustainable solutions and a strong alliance of care partners, Compassana’s aim is to counteract the complexities associated with the Swiss healthcare system and make healthcare more accessible, simpler, more efficient and safer with end-to-end integrated processes.

The following four levels, which are coordinated with each other, are necessary for the ecosystem to function:

1.) Ecosystem: networking and promoting development potential
The open and flexible ecosystem, consisting of service providers from all healthcare sectors, forms the backbone of this concept. Participants include general practitioners and specialists, pharmacies, hospitals, rehabilitation clinics, physiotherapists, laboratories, care facilities and homecare facilities. The ecosystem creates necessary framework conditions and ensures optimal networking and orchestration for all parties. This promotes transformational innovation processes and creates development potential and the basis for shaping a sustainable healthcare system. 
Working together with a strong common understanding of values, the ecosystem’s partners ensure a high, system-relevant standard of quality in the healthcare system. 

2.) Platform: information and process management
While the ecosystem defines the necessary organisational rules of the business, Compassana’s health platform provides the technological requirements. It’s the invisible heartbeat of Compassana’s ecosystem. The digital platform will enable analogue-digital services as well as data-based, end-to-end healthcare. Integrated, efficient treatment and care processes are thus promoted with solutions that are suitable for everyday use and practice. Both medical providers and patients will benefit from the digital services available on the platform.

3.) Specialist services: digitally supported services for healthcare professionals
Compassana’s specialist services include digital services with which medical service providers can improve their day-to-day work. This includes direct exchange of structured information between care providers and a common overview of all prescribed medication for a patient. And don’t forget: this also applies a common data basis to help care for patients with one or more chronic diseases or to a cross-sectoral, digitally supported and thus transparent treatment process. Our work is always based on established and medically recognised guidelines on caring for chronically ill people. In this context, health insurance companies can break new ground in terms of incentivising these processes.

4.) Patient app: coordination and navigation
Compassana offers products and services that can be used with the patient app. This app is the secure access point for patients to the healthcare system and enables optimal use of various services throughout their individual treatment paths, including online administrative services, medical and medical-related services, and digital health applications. Users can decide for themselves what data they want and grant their health specialists revocable access to it at any time.

In addition to doctors, there are a number of other specialised professional groups in the health sector, such as pharmacists, nurses, physiotherapists, nutritionists and radiologists. 

A complete list would be very extensive. In order not to deliberately exclude anyone, we use the paraphrase ‘health professionals’ or ‘health specialists’.

Since May 2023, the Compassana patient app has been available free of charge to the entire Swiss population, with a minimum age of 16.

In the future, children can be added to their parents’/guardians’ account.

• Uploading/managing health documents
• Searching for/managing health contacts
• Creating/managing a medication list (only for medications authorised in Switzerland) 
• Online appointment booking
• Sending secure messages to and from health professionals
• Viewing your timeline (past healthcare activities)
• Inputting your insurance card (previously: Groupe Mutuel, Helsana, Swica)
• Viewing your insurance information (previously: Groupe Mutuel, Helsana, Swica)
   

The Compassana app can be downloaded from the Apple (App Store) and Android (Google Play Store) app stores.

The registration process is as follows:

1. Download the Compassana app from the App Store or Google Play Store.
2. Register a new Compassana account with your email address or insurance login.
3. Verify your email
4. Video identification (with ID/passport) 

The following functions can only be used if you are insured with one of Compassana’s three partners:

• Connecting insurance policies and viewing insurance data
• Contacting remote medical services via the Compassana app
• In the future, further insurance-specific functions will be made available

However, apart from the functions described, the app is also available to everyone who does not have basic insurance with Groupe Mutuel, Helsana or Swica.

• E-mail: support@compassana.ch
• Telephone: +41 44 585 76 76 (Service hours: Mon-Sun 8 am - 7 pm)

Compassana understands data protection primarily as protecting data privacy. This means that only users can access and freely manage their account. Compassana ensures data protection through a set of technical and organisational measures. These measures comply with the applicable legal requirements and recommendations according to the current state of technology with regard to information security and data protection. 

The basis for data protection in the Compassana app comprises, first of all, very high technical information security. This is based on a type of security architecture (data privacy by design) that must also prove itself in practice through real tests by external PEN testers (PEN or penetration test is the term for comprehensively testing the security of individual computers or networks) before it is released to users.

Documents are stored on the Compassana platform. Users can therefore only access their healthcare data with internet access. The app and smartphone operate according to the Zero Trust model: this means that data is not stored on the device.

Compassana initially collects personal data as master data to identify users. This is the only way to ensure that everyone receives their own account and can use it exclusively, and that it can be protected accordingly against misuse. 

For secure identification, biometric ID card data is temporarily required by the identification service provider, which is deleted after successful identification. 

After setting up a secure account, the user can store their relevant health data and use the corresponding services in the Compassana ecosystem. These services can range from a doctor’s appointment to medication or other treatment data. This data is encrypted both during transmission and storage in such a way that no unauthorised technical access to it is possible. Finally, technical log files are collected by Compassana for secure operation of the platform. However, this ‘telemetry data’ is generated outside the user account and does not allow any direct conclusions to be drawn about individual people. 

The Compassana app, like the provider company Bluespace Ventures responsible for running it, is independent in terms of data protection law. Right from the start, there are no direct data flows to insurance companies or third parties. The Compassana app is designed so that users can independently control their accounts, with data flowing in and out. Accordingly, data is only collected with the Compassana app and on the Compassana platform with the express consent and at the instigation of the respective user in the account or forwarded from there to third parties for use and within the scope of the services selected by the user.

All ecosystem partners are committed to the vision of digitally-enabled, integrated healthcare. We are always available for more in-depth questions.

Basically, there are three models for membership in the Compassana ecosystem.

1.) Shareholders
The first group are shareholders at Bluespace Ventures AG. Shareholders provide funding to build and initially develop the ecosystem, platform and front-end apps such as the Compassana patient app and provide an interface to connect to third-party systems.

2.) Ecosystem partners
The second and largest group of members comprises the ecosystem partners. These partners include medical service providers such as doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, rehabilitation clinics, physiotherapists, laboratories, nursing homes and homecare facilities. Via Compassana, these members can collaborate digitally when treating a patient, jointly create individual treatment paths and treatment plans and develop new managed care models with the participating health insurers. By participating in Compassana, service providers can access technological solutions in a cost-effective way that they would otherwise not be able to finance themselves, or would find difficult to do so. 

3.) Service partners
The third group consists of Compassana’s service partners. These individuals are partners who provide specific digital services or products through Compassana. These range from technology providers for the platform to innovative digital health start-ups that can make their innovations available to the Swiss healthcare market via Compassana. Compassana’s task here is to identify relevant new services and offers at a very early stage, to check them for technological, clinical and medical relevance and to release them for use via Compassana. This ensures that both patients and service-providing members can be sure that only really useful services can be obtained on Compassana.

Compassana is an ecosystem business model that adds value to multiple user groups. The platform is the digital heartbeat. Compassana aims to digitally empower integrated care across all healthcare sectors and enable better patient care through digitally connected ecosystem partners and the patient app.

The patient can plan and document medical services with the app and receives the necessary information from their healthcare providers. The service providers are linked with one another via their medical practice and clinic information systems and can thus directly coordinate and manage treatments.  

Healthcare insurers’ participation in the ecosystem also offers the opportunity to explore new avenues in financing.

There are also a number of stakeholders in the Swiss healthcare market who are developing digital solutions and platforms. They all cover a sub-area of digitalisation in the healthcare market. There is a relationship with these stakeholders in certain areas and a competitive situation in other areas.

The EPD is a personal digital filing system with information about a person’s health. There are several regional EPD providers. In terms of data security, Compassana meets the same standards as the classic EPD. Compassana, however, goes one step further. It is not only intended to be a digital storage place, but it will also enable patients to organise their own health with medical and medical-related services as extensively as possible. In addition, patients can network with both service providers and even other patients, and share information that is relevant for treatment that has been freely provided by patients. 

The issue of poor interoperability in the Swiss healthcare system, especially in terms of digital networking among general practitioners, but also among specialists in private practice and hospitals, is nothing new. In the Bertelsmann Foundation/Empirica Digital Health Index ranking, Switzerland comes a distant 14th out of 17 countries, one reason being the lack of technological standards that enable a better foundation for digitally supported collaboration models among many different companies. Our established medical profession consists of about 21,000 physicians who are based in about 16,700 autonomously acting medical practices. These practices all run very different IT programmes. Compassana therefore follows a phase-oriented strategy to deliver value-added services to medical professions.  

Compassana is not a software package, but rather a platform-enabled ecosystem. The service providers, and thus also the GPs, are an inherent part of the system. Digitisation is not an end in itself; it will only be successful if it supports core tasks within medical professions. Compassana is therefore building collaborative models with technology partners, who are also grappling with the challenge of interoperability issues in the Swiss healthcare system that are not available across the board – in order to jointly develop sustainable solutions. Only then will it be possible to bring smarter digital solutions into doctors’ offices and hospitals and thus make daily work more efficient and effective.

To achieve this, Compassana is working with different communities and looking at possible solutions on how doctors and doctors’ networks can connect to the EPD via Compassana.

No, because Compassana is not a service provider and has no ambition to become one or to replace the important work done by GPs. Compassana wants to support GPs in their daily work through real, value-added digital services. The aim is to attract the best service providers to the ecosystem in order to ensure the best possible quality of treatment for patients.