Terveystalo’s new occupational healthcare technology solution greatly improves the quality of work:
“Not one healthcare worker chose their profession to spend hours filling out forms on a computer.”
Benefiting from employee understanding and technological know-how, Terveystalo’s new occupational healthcare action planning tool allows professionals to spend more time on what matters most: providing basic healthcare services and meeting with patients.
This successful digital model using Microsoft D365 can be offered elsewhere in healthcare.
Terveystalo is Finland’s largest provider of occupational health services and employs approximately 2,300 occupational health professionals and experts, whose job descriptions include creating and updating healthcare action plans.
A healthcare action plan forms the basis of occupational healthcare cooperation: it is used to agree on joint action with occupational health client organizations in accordance with official guidelines, laws, and regulations.
According to a recent Terveystalo survey, 66 per cent of occupational health professionals say creating an occupational healthcare action plan is now much faster with this new tool. This new software is easier to use than previous tools, and its introduction has reduced the number of support tickets by more than 30 percent.
The first step in the digital development of health care is listening to professionals.
Terveystalo’s goal is to build the smartest and most efficient healthcare in the world. With the help of technological innovation, healthcare professionals’ time is freed up to carry out the most important tasks as digital solutions allow for more efficiency and flexibility.
As one of Terveystalo’s goals was a smoother occupational healthcare action plan, Bofor, one of Finland’s fastest-growing companies focusing on customer data expertise, was chosen as a partner for this project.
“The best information about occupational healthcare processes comes from nurses and doctors. This project started by using the principles of user-centred design along with user interviews to create Bofor’s preliminary prototype. Based on these, we set out to develop the tool together with Terveystalo and Bofor’s teams,” says physician Maaret Helintö, Terveystalo’s chief of staff for occupational healthcare.
“One of the project’s cornerstones was to take into account software lifecycles and set KPI (key performance indicators) metrics to support this,” says Hanna Arvola-Sundström, Product Owner of Terveystalo’s healthcare action plan tool.
The end result exceeded expectations: More meaningful work and better customized customer service
According to Helintö, although there were high expectations for the prototype, the end result still exceeded everyone’s expectations.
“We succeeded in significantly speeding up healthcare action plans. When there are thousands of users, the achieved benefits are really significant. Our client companies receive more customized and targeted planning, and healthcare professionals feel they are doing more meaningful work. This was a big step in the right direction for our occupational healthcare professionals: none of them chose the field of healthcare to spend time filling in forms on a computer,” says Helintö.
Bofor co-founder Teemu Haataja says employee understanding was key.
“This solution was created by getting to know the users’ point of view and realizing that old operating methods were acting like brakes. By listening, asking, and cooperating we found a way to succeed,” says Haataja. “Now, we have a scalable operating model that has been proven to work in practice and can be offered elsewhere in healthcare.”