Last Monday, 14 September, the National Council voted for a new electronic health dossier for Switzerland. It is meant to replace the electronic patient record, which has been criticised as too complex and is used far less than hoped. Because the new dossier would reach almost everyone who lives here, it is worth understanding what was decided, what was not, and what it has to do with the health apps on your phone.

What the National Council decided

The chamber approved the bill by 134 votes to 53, with 10 abstentions, as Swissinfo reported. The key change from the old system is the default. Every resident would automatically receive a dossier, free of charge, unless they expressly object. Patients would own their information and decide what goes into the dossier and who can see it. Health professionals who work within the mandatory health insurance, from hospitals to pharmacies, would have to use it.

The technical side is meant to become simpler too. The Confederation would provide a central infrastructure, and a single national community, run and financed by the cantons, would operate the dossier. The target for it to take effect is 2030. The bill now goes to the Council of States, so none of this is final yet.

What changed on data protection

Before the vote, the National Council's health committee had worked through the bill and adopted it by 17 votes to 8. Several of its changes concern privacy and security:

  • The requirements for data protection, data security and encryption are to be written explicitly into the law, in a new article.
  • The Confederation may process data only as far as the technical operation of the dossier requires.
  • The source code of the software is to be published as far as possible.
  • People should get access settings they can understand and adjust themselves.

On encryption, the committee chose a technology-neutral rule rather than requiring strict end-to-end encryption, noting that no other national system uses it today. That is one of the points to watch as the bill moves on.

What it means for you, today

Nothing changes yet. If the bill passes both chambers in its current form, you would one day find a dossier opened in your name, which you can refuse, and you would decide which professionals may read it. It is worth knowing now that the default is changing, so the decision is yours when it comes rather than a surprise.

Practically, a dossier like this is about documents between you and the people who treat you: reports, prescriptions, test results, discharge letters. The idea is that they follow you from one practice to the next, instead of staying in separate files. Whether you want one is a personal decision, and a good one to talk through with your doctor.

How it differs from a health app

A medical record and a daily health app answer different questions. The dossier holds what your doctors and hospitals document about you. An app like Kata holds your everyday life: what you ate, how you slept, your training, your water, how you feel. That is a different kind of data, and it deserves its own careful answer about where it lives.

Kata is not a medical record and is not connected to the patient record or to the new dossier. Your health data, your chats and Kata's memory of you stay on your phone, not on our servers, and we keep no readable copy of your health story. When you ask Kata something, only your message and the context it needs travel, encrypted, to the AI to write the reply, and nothing is kept afterwards. If you want your doctor to see something, you can export your data as a file and bring it along yourself.

Two different tools, then, and they can live side by side: one for the people who treat you, one for the days in between. What they share is a principle we hope the debate in Bern keeps in view. Health data belongs to the person it describes, and that person should always know where it is and who can read it.