In many countries, healthcare organizations have hard times ahead because of the issues in their current healthcare systems. In Finland, there are significant problems in the overall patient flow management, which is painfully visible, for example, in joint emergency departments. According to the statistics of the Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare (THL), emergency department visits in primary healthcare and joint emergency departments have increased by 10.1% and at the same time, the number of long-term clients in health centers has grown by over 21% from 2019 to 2021. These problems have a horizontal impact on the entire treatment chain from access to primary healthcare to finding follow-up treatment. 

Finland seeks to solve these problems by regulation. The treatment time guarantee will change in September 2023 when the waiting time will be reduced to 14 days and at the end of 2024 it will be reduced to 7 days. Access to primary healthcare plays a crucial role in solving the challenges of emergency departments, but it’s equally important to ensure patients’ smooth access to follow-up treatment to reduce the pressure on the overloaded emergency services. 

Mentally, a patient's path begins already at home, when they receive an appointment reminder or an invitation letter from their healthcare provider. Physically, it starts when the patient arrives at the health center or at the hospital. The first thing that the patient usually encounters is a self check-in kiosk. Developing, delivering, and especially programming of such devices is routine work for us at Axel Health, so I decided to write a short blog post on the key ingredients of designing and implementing a great user experience for a self-service kiosk. 

Patient experience describes an individual’s experience of their issue, whether it is an illness or an accident, and how healthcare treats that problem. Over the past ten years, many organizations have launched and completed projects to improve the overall patient experience.

What are the key reasons for our customers to implement Axel? The answer is divided in two - for the soft and hard benefits our solution offers. Common soft benefits include improving the patient experience, modernizing the user experience, or increasing operational transparency. Today, however, we are diving into the world of hard benefits – including numbers, spreadsheets, and euros.

In many healthcare organizations, self check-in to appointments has become a daily routine. Self check-in has clear advantages – it saves healthcare resources from being tied to support-related tasks. Instead, healthcare personnel can focus on more meaningful work.

The idea of digitalization, automation, and self-service solutions is to reduce employees' workload and routine tasks and to allow them to focus on more meaningful work. Especially in the healthcare sector, there is a clear need for automation - the main task of healthcare professionals is to care for patients and to spend as little time as possible on non-essential bureaucracy and paperwork.