Minna Haanpää has been a nurse since 2006, a specialist in occupational health with experience in acute psychiatric care, primary care, and community care. Minna’s professional background is rather extensive and a truly perfect fit for Visiba, as she has also worked as a system tester within software development. A perpetually inquisitive person with a thirst for knowledge, Minna is also attending the Masters in eHealth and Health Informatics programme from Linnaeus University.

Combining hands-on and insightful experience from both tech and healthcare, Minna Haanpää is a well-rounded addition to Visiba Care’s medical advisory team. As she narrates her professional background, she remarks on the number of administration nurses take on and offers us her train of thought:

I was impressed when I started as a nurse: Tech was really easy to use, medical devices were intuitive but – the patient records and other systems were messy. I felt that all systems were designed for medical doctors. I wanted to contribute and change something for nurses, especially considering how large a percentage they are among healthcare professionals. The same applies for patients: Systems are not designed for patients, they are designed for healthcare organisations. If a system can combine all, it is great; it can empower both patients and healthcare professionals.

Being a digitally mature healthcare professional, Minna has a layered understanding of digital transformation. The biggest challenges she lists are change management and the correlation with a high workload.

Systems are stretched out and healthcare professionals have enormous workloads. When people are stressed, they are not prone to change.

She adds that end-user clinicians need to be on board, as well as patients, since ‘A lot of the healthcare exchange is based on communication; if we can’t reach the patients, we cannot succeed’. Minna adds that systems should be able to smoothly integrate. As she says, interoperability has specific challenges tied to decision making:

My interest is in semantic interoperability. To get systems to talk to each other is technically easy to solve but not quite as easy within the systems, i.e. the medical information in itself, since they are presented in different ways. There are solutions to this but they require a decision from an authority.

As to where she sees digital tools taking healthcare in the future? Her response is definite yet inspiring:

Automation is a game-changer. Automatic dispensers can free up a lot of community visits and clinical time. In primary care, a lot of the nurses’ time is spent on talking to the patients, determining the appropriate time for an appointment, passing the information on to doctors. If this process is automated to receive a solid summary of the patient case, then the time spent on this workflow will be much shorter.

Yet the patient is at the core of her philosophy. Minna stresses that the ideal scenario for the future is preventative care and empowered patients:

People seek care because they are uncertain and anxious. If we increase their proficiency and give them the right tools, we can get a lot from that. Most importantly, we can free up time to provide care to those who need it the most.