Feature
Klinik Finland takes care of medical efficiency
This Finnish online solution has been straightening care paths and reducing futile work for healthcare provision since it was founded in 2013.
All of us go to a hospital or other health care provider with health problems. Some ailments are easier to diagnose, some harder. While you should not try brain surgery at home (can get messy), there are things you can do to straighten your care path. This is where the online health information solution of Klinik Finland kicks in for the benefit of all.
“When people with health concerns go to the website of their local public health care provider that we partner with, at any time of the day, there will be a link there to our web service where they can specify all their symptoms by navigating through a query,” explains Hannu Nissinen, managing director of Klinik. “Our service then relays this information to the right counter, the system algorithms having determined severity and urgency, and the patient will be given an appointment accordingly.”
This means that there is no more wasting time waiting on the phone, standing in line or figuring out who to turn to.
“Those with less serious cases will receive self-care instructions based on the symptoms,” Nissinen continues.
Online medical information making sense
Additionally, Klinik Finland’s solution helps tackle two common problems related to online health information.
“The thing about Internet chat boards is that the emphasis of peer-to-peer health discussions tends to be on the unusual and serious cases, whereas the majority of people with corresponding symptoms but just minor issues or non-issues stay silent,” Nissinen states. “Klinik provides clear information in plain language to help laymen better determine what’s up with them.”
The second scenario sees the use of difficult jargon in professional online sources, often leaving consumers visiting the website fearing for the worst.
“One could say a communicative barrier exists between health care pros and patients,” Nissinen notes. “Our aim is to provide clear clues about the patient’s situation including relevant self-care guidance.”
In support of healthcare pros
How do care professionals relate to such service that threatens to cut their patient queues and, potentially, income?
“Every doctor and nurse wants to help their patients get well and stay well as efficiently and effortlessly as possible,” Nissinen says. “Our service benefits the public health care domain by helping to reduce work overload, such as that related to care need assessments made over the phone, which burden the system a lot.”
The patient contacts coming via Klinik’s service only take around a couple of minutes to process and help to guide the patient straight to the right place, saving a lot of staff time on aggregate as well as patient waiting time and allowing the staff to focus on the patients.
“That’s what we are about, not about redundancies in the sector,” Nissinen underlines.
After news broke last year that the company had secured a 500 000- euro funding round, Klinik is now on the lookout for international business opportunities. When appropriate partners are found, Klinik is ready to adapt their system for different country-specific circumstances, including language versions.
“Insurance companies or medical centre chains would be suitable partners for us abroad,” Nissinen says.
And so, in the midst of burgeoning public healthcare costs, we should be happy to get all the help we can – and it seems that Klinik Finland can make it all less of a burden, indeed.