This project, developed for the Continuity of Knowledge brief within the DfG course, explores how Kanta, Finland’s national digital health platform, can shift from a passive archive to a proactive tool for elderly care. Collaborating with Kela and Kanta, and healthcare professionals, the team focuses on addressing isolation and promoting early intervention for older adults.
How can narrative and design shift a national care system? This post reflects on our team –Care Group 1– proposal for the Ministry of Health and KELA, focusing on continuity of knowledge in elderly care. It highlights the power of communication and storytelling in promoting preventive, human-centered care—and the role design plays in making visions actionable.
HyMy Village at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences addresses the challenges of linear digital solutions in Finnish elderly care by combining multidisciplinary, human-centered collaboration with digital tools. By integrating data with lived experiences, the project enhances continuity of knowledge and holistic care, moving beyond linear metrics to support adaptive, personalized well-being for elderly clients
We explored the continuity of knowledge in elderly care in Finland. Through fieldwork using abductive reasoning, we focused on human perspectives and found that social workers hold valuable insights for preventive elderly care. Our research highlighted the value of human interaction and some policy gaps. We aim to refine our insight to support care with empathy.
Finland’s ageing population is challenging the coordination of the current care system. While medical data is being stored and collected, information about the social aspects of ageing still struggles to enter the system. In this scenario, integrating social and health care is the direction to take, ensuring continuity of knowledge to support this demographic shift.
Finland’s ageing population demands a more innovative, more connected healthcare system, but a fragmented system threatens patient care in Finland. As a continuation of the first blog post, this one focuses more on systems in healthcare. In our conclusion, social workers hold the key to bridging gaps between medical, social, and informal care.
Admist increasing healthcare costs, a shrinking tax base to fund healthcare, an aging population that will demand more health services, continuity of care is a proposed model to make healthcare more efficiently able to cope with the future. Underpinning continuity of care is the continuity of knowledge and information and how it is structured.
This blog entry summarises findings concerning healthcare reform “SOTE” and a new General Practitioner model. The short text provides reasons for both changes introduced by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health & Finnish Government highlighting its positive and negative implications. Ultimately, an uncomfortable, speculative question emerges: Might these changes neglect doctors’ well-being?
The first blog of the Digitalization and Kanta Workstream presents an initial understanding of Finland’s and international digital healthcare services through desktop research. The importance of initiative for both the users and the providers, the inclusiveness for ageing groups in digitalization, and the focus of Kanta as a centralization platform is addressed.
In our project, we analyze Finland’s elderly health and social care system, mapping key actors, services, and data flows. With the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and Kela, we investigate how patient information is managed, where gaps exist, and how better information sharing could enhance elderly care.