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. 

Do you know what computers are good at? Computing. Do you know what optimization is? A mathematical problem. 

Healthcare service production requires careful planning, and the larger the unit sizes become, the larger is the planning effort required. What does it take to produce efficient healthcare services? In simple terms, patients and professionals need to encounter in the same location – and this location also needs to offer the equipment and materials required, no matter if they’re related to diagnostics, care, or medication.

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. 

Almost on a daily basis, we get to read about failed healthcare IT projects in various media. The problem is global. However, the actual software solution provider may not always be the one to blame ‒  instead, the reason may lie in the fact that the healthcare organization doesn’t really know what it is acquiring.

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about the benefits of patient flow management in terms of numbers. In part 1, I focused on the benefits of self service at the front desk and in part 2 I discussed the benefits from the healthcare units' perspective.

In healthcare, one of the biggest challenges has always been the organization of diagnostics and treatment of contagious diseases in hospitals and health centers. It’s effective to focus complex healthcare actions requiring a lot of professionals and equipment under one roof. At the same time, because of this way of organizing, a large number of people having an infectious disease, such as influenza or Covid-19, may be sitting in the same waiting room. In that room, one patient can expose many other people to the disease, although a health center should be a place to seek cure for illnesses, not the other way around.