Aalto University: Recent policy recommendation: Individual’s role in managing health data needs to be strengthened

The giants of the platform economy, which have expanded into healthcare, are already looking to enter Finland. Finland has every chance to succeed with its own platform solutions, but it requires overcoming three challenges, say researchers at Aalto University.

The health and social services (Sote) reform, which has been underway since 2006, will bring many changes to the organization of health care. At the same time, in many ways, less attention has been paid to an even more significant revolution: the digitalisation of healthcare and, in particular, the development of platform-based solutions using health data. It is estimated that better use of IT could reduce social and health care costs by 2.5-5.5 billion Euros between 2019 and 2028.

“Digitalisation can simultaneously improve the quality of health care and reduce its cost. However, there are three big challenges along the way – all of which can be solved,” says Robin Gustafsson, Professor at Aalto University. He is leading the Business Finland-funded Policy Rationales in the Shift to Digital Platform Economy research project, on the basis of which Aalto University researchers issued a policy recommendation on accelerating the platform economy in the healthcare sector.

The recommendations are based on an extensive analysis of more than 100 research articles and a workshop attended by leading experts in platform economy and digital healthcare from the private and public sectors.