A walk in the clouds with Finnish healthcare service providers
Cloud adaptation and virtualization was in the center of last week’s discussion. Both Carl Eschenbach (Partner, Sequoia Capital and Ex-COO, VMware) and Jeff Welser (Vice President and Lab Director, IBM Research) covered the history as well as the future of cloud development. According to both, the finance and healthcare agencies are the slowest in adopting cloud services since being the most sensitive and concerned about security of the data in their possession. The recent report by McKinsey & Company (2016) only confirmed these insights. Comparing the companies in different sectors, McKinsey & Co indicated a variety of levels of cloud adoption. According to the report, some companies were able to move more than 50% of their operations into cloud, while others reached only 5%.
It made me curious to look in more details and share with you the case of Finnish healthcare sector. This small Nordic country (proud homeland of Finnish sauna, Nokia and Angry Birds) is considered as a forerunner in digital and cloud technology.
As noticed by Jeff Welser, 90% of created and captured cloud data is left unanalyzed. In case of healthcare services, many pharmaceutical and health-related companies would benefit the most if having access to accumulation of data. However, they still have no rights to access it. The recent press release of Finnish innovation agency indicates Finland as a “forerunner in designing new legislation for secondary and secure use of data on well-being and health” (IBM 2016). This triggers an interesting question; how the privacy and security issues are handled in the case of healthcare providers in Finland?
Having a relative working in both, Finnish public and private healthcare services for over 40 years, I decided to contact her and ask about how patient data handling processes are organized in Finland. I will summarize the insights of my discussion with her below:
- Every citizen of Finland has a history of healthcare in his or her own hospital’s (cloud) database. According to Finnish laws, only one’s doctor has a power to look through these documents. Patient needs to sign a written approval if willing to allow someone else to see that data.
- Until now, public healthcare services operated under different municipalities in every Finnish region. Currently, the whole Finnish healthcare system is going through a centralization process the purpose of which is to scale all public and private health service operations under the centralized jurisdiction.
- There are few competing cloud service providers that have agreements with different municipalities. At the same, the infrastructure of all cloud platforms are compatible. Such, if individual is moving from one city to another, hospitals can exchange the information immediately upon one’s written request. With time centralization of healthcare system will result in fewer service providers and more centralized cloud service as well.
- Data clouds are tied to the workplace (hospital), so no one (including doctors) have possibility to access the data from anywhere else, but hospital facilities.
Cloud services have 100% penetration in case of Finnish healthcare system. While reading more on that topic I also found out that it is not only the healthcare sector is that advanced. According to Cloud maturity Index by Tieto (2017) 85% of organizations in Finland use cloud services.
What do you think, will the rest of the world follow this example? How difficult would it be to implement similar innovations in e.g. case of US healthcare system?
References:
McKinsey & Company (2016) Leaders and laggards in enterprise cloud infrastructure adoption. Found at: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/leaders-and-laggards-in-enterprise-cloud-infrastructure-adoption
IBM (2016) http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/finland-and-ibm-partner-to-develop-personalized-healthcare-and-spark-economic-growth-with-watson-300327635.html
Tieto (2017) The benefits of Cloud maturity Cloud Maturity Index, http://pages.tieto.com/Cloud-Maturity-Index-2017.html
Interviews:
Interview with healthcare professional (Finland) on 07/09/2017. Whatsapp. 32minutes.
6 comments on “A walk in the clouds with Finnish healthcare service providers”
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Hi Natasha, it’s fascinating how Finland has managed this issue; healthcare seems to be one of those areas where having more data can vastly improve the quality of service, but is also (rightly) throttled by the concerns of privacy and security.
I’m from Singapore, which recently also introduced a government-led program to a national, integrated health-care system. It seems to span both private and public hospitals (https://www.moh.gov.sg/content/moh_web/home/pressRoom/Parliamentary_QA/2017/national-electronic-health-record.html).
The main benefit is that “Patients also may benefit from proper, right-sited disease management and cost savings, as duplicate or unnecessary tests are eliminated and medication errors are reduced.” (https://newsroom.accenture.com/industries/health-public-service/accenture-wins-contract-to-implement-singapores-national-electronic-health-record-system.htm)
While I haven’t been able to find information about the restrictions that Singapore has placed on the program in order to ensure appropriate levels of privacy, it is interesting to see that multiple countries are moving towards an integrated healthcare record system.
Hi Natasha,
I think you are correct on many grounds. Healthcare, of all sectors need cloud services urgently. With EMR (Electronic medical records) becoming the new trend, the only way to share this data seamlessly and to secure it, cloud services is the only viable and sustainable option. Moving the EMR’s to the cloud has numerous benefits for the patient (immediate access by doctors which can help in speedy decisions), doctors (analyzing the cloud data can help in making accurate and informed predictions) and researchers. A successful cloud service called STARLIMS is provided by the American healthcare company, Abbott. It is a widely used product by healthcare companies across the US. I also believe that having a much larger population than Finland, moving all the patient records to a centralized cloud in the US will be a more arduous task.
Thank you Natasha for your post and sharing insights on how Finnish healthcare services are doing in the cloud. I believe that EMRs play a vital role in augmenting the hospital experience in the long-term. What comes to scale, AI will definitely play a role in this and some clinics are already experimenting with virtual nurses and doctors including Mayo Clinic https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/14/virtual-nurse-app-sense-ly-raises-8-million-from-investors-including-the-mayo-clinic/. There are currently a variety of different types of healthcare startups utilising AI as a part of their solution which will be able to provide more personalised treatment for their patients once there is a consistent way of accessing patient’s health data. Check here for more on healthtech startups: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-startups-healthcare/
That is a great pace that Finland is setting! It is necessary for patient health information to be accessible worldwide. I can imagine a random case where a man from Madagascar travels to Mongolia for a week for tourism. He does not understand nor speak Mongolian. He has an allergy to some food that can cause death when ingested and is not attended to quickly. He decides to try out Mongolian cuisine; however he cannot communicate his allergy due to language barrier. Unfortunately he consumes the food he is allergic to without knowing and collapses. First aid comes but they cannot establish the exact problem that this man is suffering from. Time is running, the doctors are doing brute force testing of all possible cases. Some doctors think its a stroke or heart attack, others think its an asthma attack. By the time they rule out all possibilities, the man is dying….
Moral of the story….we need health data on the cloud.
Great post offering insights into the Finnish healthcare sector and related cloud technology! As a Finnish student, I found it particularly interesting – thank you!
I discovered an interesting article about cloud computing around the world:
https://cloudtweaks.com/2012/11/cloud-security-a-round-up-of-prominent-highlights-across-the-planet/
As explained in the article, different countries and continents seem to have diverse approaches to handling cloud security. For instance, Europe is more concentrated on legislation for virtual data safety whereas America is more focused on handling possible cyber criminal acts. I think that cloud services will certainly be the future direction, even though these data security matters will take some time to solve, especially in the healthcare sector.
Thank you Natasha for a really insightful post. Having had the privelege to closely follow some of the Finnish startups in this space, such as Netmedi (http://netmedi.fi/about-us/), Meedoc (https://meedoc.com/about-us/), and Noona Healthcare (http://www.noona.com), I wonder how big their impact has been on driving the healthcare industry towards consolidation and the cloud. Do you think that the relatively large number of startups operating in this space has contributed to speeding up the process on the governement side?
Another interesting facet of the Finnish data privacy laws became evident from the merger of two of the largest private healthcare providers Terveystalo and Diacor earlier this year. The merger will also result in a merger of patient data. This is described in Terveystalo’s abboubcement: “The patient does not have the right to prohibit the transfer of information. According to law, a patient’s medical records must be kept for 12 years after the patient’s death or, if there is no information about the patient’s death, for 120 years after the patient’s date of birth. After the legal merger in the autumn of 2017, Terveystalo will be the official registrar and therefore legally obliged to preserve and archive patient information.” (https://www.terveystalo.com/Global/Asiakkaana/Diacor/Information%20for%20Terveystalo%27s%20and%20Diacor%27s%20customers.pdf). From a privacy standpoint, what do you think about the possibility to get easy access to patient data through mergers?