My experiences of the digitalisation
I was born in the early 1980s and lived my youth in the 1990s, when the development of technology and digitalisation began to touch me as well. However, I am very familiar with the landline telephone culture. So after that, I’ve often wondered how worried parents have been about us young people in the 1990s when phones haven’t carried. They just had to trust that we would make it. Sometime in the late 1990s, I got my first “bigger” cell phone because I moved out of my childhood home. On top of all that, its price was significant in the student budget. Many of my friends didn’t have a cell phone yet at the time. There was no Nintendo, commondore, or similar game culture in my family. Maybe because of that, I still don’t have any interest in video games. VCR videos were used to rent from R-kiosk a few times a year. The first computer was acquired in 2003, when I started writing a bachelor’s thesis. Until then, the computers provided by the schools had been sufficient. So there has been a big leap in my life to this day, where technology and digitalization regulate our lives in every way.
When I started in the healthcare area in 2004, digitalization made its entry into healthcare systems. The VITA system was already in use at that time. Laboratory results were found in the system and vaccinations were also entered into the system. I remember the program worked with a few keystrokes that were hard to learn at first. In fact, the program still seems to be in some form in use in the lab. Pretty soon at the beginning of my career, the Effica patient information system became a newer version of the current Lifecare system. In the beginning, patient papers and the electronic system had to be used in parallel, as previous information was found only in papers. I remember that employee confidence in the electronic system also took time. Personally, I have been in the same health center my entire career, so there is little experience or comparison of different patient information systems.
In my own work as a diabetes nurse, I have seen just how much progress has been made in the treatment of diabetes and new treatment tools with the development of technology and digitalization. Continuous sensing of blood sugar and intelligent insulin pumps make life easier for many diabetics and also allow health care to be better monitored as information is transferred through the cloud service.
The future of Digitalisation
Digitalisation makes my job as a nurse easier and more secure, but it is also very vulnerable. Even power outages can cause programs to crash quickly and all unsaved data will be lost. From time to time, there may be a problem with the software that slows it down. Next year, we are moving to wellness areas that will bring their own challenges. There are far too many different patient information systems in different localities that will never talk to each other. On the other hand, the Kanta service is a tool where information can be found. The Kanta service has been a great step in the development of digitalisation. However, its use should be further expanded and motivated to be used more by healthcare professionals and citizens.
I would also like to highlight the future threat posed by the war in Ukraine, both physical and digital, for the future. The world is no longer the same and we also need to pay more attention to how we protect great digital systems from various attacks.
In healthcare, technology and the development of digitalisation have enormous potential. Research into their use in healthcare is being conducted all the time. However, implementation seems to be very slow, which is certainly understandable in the healthcare sector, which is about human health. Slow implementation is also boosted by Finland’s strict legislation on the approval of various healthcare technology devices.
I think the Omaolo service is a great step forward in motivating citizens to self-care. The Internet is used by almost everyone, so the service is available to an even larger number of people. Here you will find reliable information and guidance on when to stay home with your symptoms and when to contact your healthcare provider.
Video telehealth are already commonplace and are sure to increase. Especially from the perspective of working-age people, this brings relief to self-care. Smart watches and various applications are also very popular and they should be able to utilize them more in healthcare. Some wellness applications can already be integrated into your own data in the Kanta service.
The amount of information that digitalisation brings with it is huge and it must also be possible to filter it. This will be a problem for the future, as Kenneth Cukier (2014) stated in his lecture.
Open digital society
An open digital society is today’s trend and you have to know how to live with it. It creates a lot of opportunities, but it also has a lot of risks. One often does not even know how much personal data is circulating on the internet. In the old days, it is thought that the passport is stored behind locks, but there may be much more to steal on your own computer. Andy Yen described well in her lecture how email is not secure either, even though we often imagine it to be so.
GDPR brings security to individuals by improving the protection of personal data and also increases the means to manage personal data. I think that many citizens do not fully know how many rights we each have to process our own personal data and how we can prevent them from being processed. This, too, should be made more public in order to raise public awareness.
GDPR is present in my day-to-day work when I open patient information and record patient health information in Lifecare. Each recording must be appropriate so that both the caregiver and the patient can return to it if necessary. As a caregiver, it is clear to me that without a care relationship, no patient’s data can be opened and there must always be a record of opening patient data.
The autonomy of the GDPR over one’s own data can also be a negative issue for healthcare. A customer’s ban on, for example, specialist care information can sometimes compromise patient safety, because important information is not immediately available.
Self evalution
The first section of this course has opened my eyes and raised awareness of the opportunities and risks of digitalization. In the beginning, I got back to the past thinking about how digitalization has evolved in my own life. I can only say that the development has been enormous. There may be too much information coming from many different channels, which also causes stress. How will people cope with the increasing flood of information in the future? I would like to learn even more about cybersecurity and perhaps it will be covered in other sections of the course.
I commented on these blogs:
Taija’s site | Uusi Savonia Blogi Sites -sivusto
DIGI SOCIETY – Anniina´s Blog (savonia.fi)
Reference:
Cukier, Kenneth 2014. Big data is better data.https://www.ted.com/talks/kenneth_cukier_big_data_is_better_datadata | TED Talk. Refferred 8.6.2022.