Denmark and Finland at the top – Norway in 17th place
The fact that Denmark achieves such good results probably has several explanations, but at least in recent years the country has shown great willingness to invest in digitization in the health sector.
A concrete example of the project “My E-hospital” – a digital solution that makes it possible to monitor patients better from home. Denmark has learned from the pandemic that the country must step up digitization in order to free up human resources. The solution, which Netcompany has developed together with doctor Thea Kølsen Fischer and her research group at Nordsjælland’s hospital, developed that patients communicate continuously with the hospital and receive equipment to measure breathing, saturation, blood pressure, pulse and temperature. The results are sent several times a day via an app developed specifically for the project. Even now, relatively early in the project, we see that home hospitalization has a positive effect on the patient’s mental health.
These days, it’s a new strategy for E-health at work. In what has been communicated so far, we miss that it is necessary for patients to be able to interact with the healthcare system from home to a greater extent. For residents, patients and relatives, active participation in their own health is not just about having insight into their own records and health information, but also about being able to digitally delete data with healthcare personnel.
It is not just healthcare personnel who must be able to share data with patients, it should be possible to do this in other ways as well and at the same time safeguard both data security and personal data in a proper manner. In some context, this may be a decision for patients to be able to be on their own at home; namely the certainty that healthcare professionals will contact the data that patients share and patients need medical help.
Another under-communicated issue is that health data must be available to several levels of the health service. This makes everyday work simpler and leaves less room for misinformation. We must avoid the establishment of more silos in the health service. The offer must be broad, but the information must be easily shared between different stages and bodies in the course of treatment so that patient safety is ensured at all times.
Geir Arne Olsen
Head of Norway at Netcompany