HUS: Time to construct future health care

Development never stops

Over the years, Health Village has developed from an information platform into a service that supports the interaction between patient and professional as well as the entire treatment process. The starting point for development is a good treatment experience for the patients - patients and patient organizations have been strongly involved in the development work.

The services are also widely used on mobile devices. Easy daily transactions can be better supported by, for example, fingerprint authentication and message notifications. The aim is that during 2021, all of HUS’s digital treatment paths will also be available as mobile applications.

Digital treatments already enable controlled home care for chronic diseases. In the future, for example, artificial intelligence can help support diabetes treatment. AI measures blood sugar, calculates insulins and dietary guidelines, and offers instructions for action to the patient. If there is something abnormal in the situation, the patient is invited to the reception.

“The fact is that during the next few years, fewer nurses will enter the market, while the population will age and the demand for health services will increase. The question is how to close this gap. We believe that the gap is reduced by using technology wisely. With the help of tech we can also bring a sense of security to be at home,” says Mikko Rotonen, HUS’s Director of IT Development.

Mikko Rotonen, IT-Development Director, HUS Data Administration

Preventive health care

The strategic goal of HUS is to produce customer-oriented digital transformation during 2020–2024. In 2020, remote visits accounted for 7.5 percent of all HUS reception visits, and in 2021 the target is 15 percent. Concerning digital treatment paths, the target is to get 20 percent of patients covered by services this year.

“Combining digital and in-person services can save the patient’s time, money and increase the quality of treatment in situations when, instead of a single conversation, the customer could watch, for instance, an instructional video as many times as needed. When the patient comes to the reception, both parties understand that it requires more than what could be done digitally, and thus the importance of interaction is emphasized,” says Visa Honkanen, Development Director at HUS.

The ongoing development of mobile services and bringing various device integrations and elements that anticipate the need for care into the Health Village will make the patient's treatment even more flexible and real-time. The starting point for the development is to build good support for the expansion of the Health Village ecosystem by enabling the integrations of other applications used by patients and professionals to digital treatment paths.

"More features will be added to the tools so that clinics can bring new technology and tools to patient processes," says Aki Puustjärvi, Development Manager at HUS Information Management.

Visa Honkanen, Development Director, HUS

Duplicable eHealth concept

TietoEVRY has been an application and architecture development partner for Health Village since 2017. The next big steps in the development of Health Village services are service integration between primary health care, special medical care and social work/home care. The goal is that the services appear to the citizen as one entity and the transaction becomes seamless, regardless of the care organization. Thanks to the services, information flows efficiently also between multi-professional teams.

The work is done by utilizing agile development and service design. The foundation is based on a good dialogue between the clinics, HUS’s information management and TietoEVRY. Digital treatment paths need to match clinics’ vision of the patient's treatment, and the tools need to be user friendly so that clinics can use them by themselves.

“We haven’t built a ready-made diabetes path or a kidney path, but tools that help the clinics themselves to make treatment paths suitable for them. The collaborative environment is used by the clinics to actively create the clinical content” says Aki Puustjärvi.

In addition to the web platform and applications, Health Village includes an eHealth Services development program that supports service planning, implementation and digital transformation management. The internationally unique Health Village service can also be transferred and modified to benefit and fit the use and market needs outside Finland.

Aki Puustjärvi, Development Manager, HUS Data Administration

View of patient's user interface in Health Village. 

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