”The Self-care project package in Oulu, to which the electronic service portal also belongs, aims at improving the availability of social and health care services. The technology already exists; the purpose of the project is to put together a functional technical entity with efficient processes and test these in practice. The social and health care services of Oulu want to establish themselves as international leaders in the use and development of customer-oriented welfare technology,” says Anne Niska from the City of Oulu. ”The new model will not cut services. It will introduce new, alternative channels of getting health care services as needed. The technical solution is based on responding to the needs and wishes of citizens, and therefore it must be flexible, easy to use and reliable."

”We believe that people are motivated to participate in their care process, they want to take responsibility for their own health and are ready to learn to use new channels. Northern Europeans are already used to handling their bank transactions and travel ticket orders over the Internet, so electronic services in confidential matters is not new to them," says Timo Koistinen, Director of Mawell’s Finnish and Baltic operations.

The idea of this extensive project is to develop a self-care service that provides citizens with easy access to health-related information and services. Based on Mawell S7 products, the solution comprises online time reservation, laboratory result reception through a portal and the opportunity to ask professionals about health-related questions. Mawell is also supplying the system for customer data management.

At the first phase of the project, online time reservations can be made for pregnancy and maternity counselling. ”When making time reservations, bank ID codes are used for authentication so that the system automatically knows which services the user is entitled to; for example, if he/she is covered by maternity counselling services or included in certain screenings. In order to use the electronic time reservation service, the user must first visit the health centre personally during the pilot phase. In many health centres, nurses answer phones and guide patients in addition to their actual patient work. The online time reservation automates some of these tasks and shifts some of them to be the patient’s responsibility so, consequently, nurses will have more time for actual patient care,” Koistinen says.

The new system also enables receiving some laboratory test results on an Internet portal. The doctor informs the patient of the nature of the results and care instructions in advance, and after this the patient won’t have to come back to the health centre. Upon receiving the test results, the patient can also get feedback related to them and ask further questions from a nurse or doctor.

”In the next phase of the system, the results will be displayed on a chart that indicates subjective values and the values recommended in the Current Care guidelines by the Govermental Medical Societies. In this way the user can easily see, for example, if his/her cholesterol levels conform with recommendations,” Koistinen tells us.

Mawell’s online consultation tool allows citizens to ask health-related questions over the Internet. ”Bank IDs are also used for logging into this system, which enables the nurse or doctor to consult the user’s personal patient data. Users can ask any health-related questions and their question will be directed to a respective professional; for example, questions related to diabetes will be answered by a diabetes nurse. In this way, people won’t have to come to health centres to get answers to their questions, which shortens the queues in health centres and those in need of urgent care get to see a doctor more quickly, " Koistinen sums up.

”Furthermore, these solutions increase patients' commitment and motivation to their treatment, which usually reflects in better treatment results," Niska adds. ”I believe that the need for such services will be further emphasised in the future. Oulu's model could be used to provide flexible services and secure the right to good care also outside the major cities."

Further information:

Timo Koistinen
Director, Finnish and Baltic operations
Mawell Oy
Tel: +358 40 560 4655
E-mail: Timo Koistinen

Anne Niska
Project Director
Self-care and Health Centre Technology project of Oulu
Tel: +358 44 703 4167
E-mail: Anne Niska, Ouka (fi)

Mawell is an innovative and fast growing Nordic healthcare technology company. We provide our solutions internationally to private and public healthcare organisations and pharmaceutical companies. We rely on extensive industry knowledge, open standards and patient centric technology. To our customers we provide human technology bringing efficiency and productivity and leaving more time to care. Our company is the market leader in Virtual Patient Informatics (VPI) in North Europe.