Sveinung Gangstø, MD, is a specialist in General Practice and emergency room manager in the Bjørnafjorden municipality. Sveinung has been a practicing GP in Os municipality in Norway for many years and has been a Senior Advisor of the Norwegian Directorate of eHealth for 3 years, planning solutions for Norwegian healthcare. He has also held the positions of Head of Medical leader at a cloud-based solution company facilitating endurance training. Today he resides and works in Bjørnafjorden, where, alongside General Practice, he is also responsible for the municipality’s medical services; General Practice, home care facilities, and emergency services.

Sveinung has been active in digital health for a long time and has seen both the procuring and the commercial side. Tomas Ed, Country Manager in Visiba Care Norway, approached him to collaborate with the company, where, among other things, he is part of the medical advisory team for Red Robin.

Sveinung looks to the future, where digital health will be an integral part of care delivery. Nevertheless, he remarks that this work begins today and it starts with changing the way healthcare works to become more efficient.

We could become more effective and provide better service for our patients. There is still a long way to go but it has started. We need to use digital tools to meet the growing challenges in healthcare. In the future, we will be facing the demographic problem head-on. We will need more potent tools to face this challenge – and we cannot continue working as we do now. We have to change our way of working and empower patients.

However, Sveinung sees the benefits of this beginning paying off already:

We can get the information we need – when we need it. Today, it is easier to exchange information between different healthcare organisations; It is easier for patients to contact their healthcare provider. We, as healthcare professionals, can also work more efficiently.

We asked Sveinung to share some of his inspiration and advise his colleagues who are rightfully sceptical regarding this increase in accessibility. He wisely remarks:

It is rather scary opening up – especially when you have so much to do and you don’t have the time to get to know other ways of working. My experience with digital solutions is that, when the tool is appropriate and set up the right way, we get more time with patients. It is important that GPs still have control. We had this problem in Norway, but once digital transformation started, there’s hardly anyone who wants to go back to the old way of working. In my opinion, there are a lot of advantages in digital health, as long as it’s used in the right way and clinicians are working with technology development to make good solutions.