I got my first cell phone when I was 10 years old. The first things I remember about that phone is that it was quite large in size, it looked like a banana because of the yellow corour and it had this funny and addictive wormgame. About that same time we bougth our first computer. Compared to our computers nowadays the first one we had operated very slowly and had black and white screen. To connect to the internet you had to listen to this funny dialing sound and it took forever to connect. One of my favorite things to do on line was to hang out in the Kolumbus portal and play Habbo virtualhotel game. At that time it was quite popular thing to do, so I´ll bet that there are few other that remember this game too. These were my fist encounters with technology and digitalization. In time the technology has improved a lot and digitalization has evolved to what it is today. To have grown up in this developing environment I can proudly say that I have definitely benefitted from it a lot because a young mind can absorb new information effortlessly and it´s more eager to learn and experiment everything new.

I have over 15 years of experience in a field of health care. At the moment I work as a registered nurse in a hospital at home which is part of Pallative care center in Joensuu. At the beginning of my career I worked in different wards. At that time patients health care documentation was done by hand. Then came the first electronic patient record system. First document uploads took a long time and it was quite slow and laborious process. Fortunately times have changed and electronical record systems have developed over time but still they haven managed to develped recording system without flaws yet. During my time as a nurse the care equipment has also taken big lepas forward. Equipments have grown smaller in size and one equipment may have more the one useful purpose.

At my current work the latest technology step in to the digitalization has been the remote accass with patients in hospital at home care. Especially the use of videoconsultatio as a part of care practice. The benefits of videoconsultation are timesaving and flexibility of schedules and it is a way to utilize medical resources better in health care. The use of remote access and softwarse like microsoft temas took a huge leap as becoming part of our everyday work tools as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. In a short period of time everyone needed to adabt new work methods and learn how to use different softwares and tools as efficiently as possible to continue working during the pandemic. Nowadays we can´t even imagine working without digital softwares and tool. That´s how normal it has become.

The future of health care?

What can one expect from the future of health care? From my perspective the first thing that comes in mind is how technology and digitalization can be used as a way to alleviate the lack of resources in health care. For exemple it takes any health care staff quite a lot of time to report and document patient records. All of this time cloud be used towards presence in patien care. I would like to think that in the near future artificial intelligence could be used to solve this problem. Maybe patient records could be dictated so that the artificial intelligence would actually do the rest of documentation?

From the broad perspective AI and technology are already been used in different areas of health care. For example pocket-size high-resolution ultrasound and wireless remote sensors which

enable doctors to monitor the patients condition in real time and provide timely intervention by gathering information such as heart rate and blood pressure level etc. By gathering infromation from patients medical history, medication he is on and by the way he lives AI can predict how likely he may one day have some form of cancer or how big is hes cardiovascular event risk. These kinds of technical solutions and remot access will likely increas in near future. Look at how much we produce and gather data ourselves by using smartwach just to improve our personal wellbeing. Why aren´t we already using this data and information as a part of ones health care plan?

Digital society and its risks

Technology and digitalization have given us many advantages but with what cost? There are new types of risks which have emerged due to this digitalization. Every one should know how to look after their own data protection and privacy. For example its quite easy to share too much information on a social media without knowing even knowing it. Over sharing online may have affects on you life even after a long period of time. The data just stays and it won´t disappear. That everybody should remember.

EU´s general data protection regulation is intended to protect us and our personal data. The regulation promotes and controles ones access to personal data as well as unites uses of international business data protection. We have right to know who is tracking or collecting our data and we have right to decide how the data is being used.

Once in my career I have encountered a situation where the patient has not allowe to his personal medical data to be transfered from one data base to another. This could have caused different types of risks to the patients medicalcare continuity. In addition patients have a right to know thing that are written to patient medical data and who has looked at the records.

Self-evaluation

Digitalization and technology are very familiar subjects to me through my thesis and previous courses. I reflected the given task through the things I have learned previously. Orientation materials were very eye-opening and interesting. It got me thinking about life and how it would look in 10 or 20 years’ time. When I started to write my own blog it was a new thing to me. Overall its has been easier than I have anticipated.

My comments to these blogs: Anna-Miia Niskanen & Sonja Juutinen