Health Village Story
We at Helsinki University Hospital started developing eServices for mental patients a decade ago and the first groundbreaking eHealth service, Mental Hub, was launched in 2009.
It was a great success. Based on the good feedback from the citizens and professionals we decided to develop similar services to other healthcare specialties. We called them hubs, and in the end the hubs created a village, Health Village. Currently, Digital Health Village consists now of 33 hubs, 400 digital care pathways, and 9 virtual knowledge centers.
The development of the Health Village concept accelerated in one of the key projects of Finnish government, in the Virtual Hospital 2.0 project (2016–2018). The project received funding from the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and it was organized in collaboration with the university hospitals of Helsinki, Turku, Tampere, Kuopio and Oulu. Helsinki University Hospital coordinates the development. Technology key partners are Innofactor, Microsoft and Tieto.
During the development we decided to change both back end and front end. In 2014, we decided to start using cloud services, and Health Village was among the first services we run in our Microsoft Azure Private Cloud. Flexible platforms and services, the latest versions and automated updates are contemporary datacenter services that every modern IT Unit would like to have.
The number of applications for citizens has grown rapidly, and the possibility to register vital signs and activities is now considered normal. Today, smartphones can function as a platform even for CE-marked medical devices. Computing is everywhere and accessing health and well-being services is technically possible almost everywhere in the world. There is meaning behind all the data that these services are continuously creating.
The vision of Health Village is the revolution of health and well-being services by digital means. Health Village revolutionizes healthcare by offering global digital, tailored service platform that gathers best professionals, latest information and better digital and local care for patients.
Revolution enables reallocation of healthcare resources – care is supported by data but it is not depending on time, place or health care professionals. Health Village is a continuous and learning system that optimizes impact and costs of the services.
We wish that we find other organizations in Europe and around the world, that are interested in sharing this revolution and will join us in developing value-based healthcare services of the future.
