As a forty-year-old woman, I can say that the world has changed completely with digitalization during my lifetime. I spent childhood where we used landlines and when I was a teenager my dad bought the Finland´s smallest mobile phone on the market. It was the size of a small suitcase and felt absolutely amazing: we had a phone that could take with us when we left the house! At that time, we dreamed if there could ever be a phone where you could also see the recipient`s picture… Only a few years later, Skype video calls took their place all around the world.
When I was a teenager, computer skills were start to taught in schools. I remember the moment when I did my first Yahoo search for the very first time. It felt unbelievably great that the computer found the pages that I was interested in so easily and it felt like all the information in the world was suddenly available in me. At that time, there was no talk of source criticism yet, neither about the “dangers” of the Internet.
When I started my career as a nurse in the early 2000s, all treatment information was recorded in patient records by hand. The nurses literally used pen and paper to do all that. As a similar way doctor´s written prescriptions to paper by hand. It was a huge change when hospitals gradually became completely paperless. Although going paperless was a big and necessary step forward, the use of various information systems in healthcare also requires a lot of nurses’ time, which many feel problematic.
Even though electric patient information systems have been in use for two decades, there are still problems in their use that professionals face on a daily work. One of the biggest problems is the fragmentation of patient data. When a patient uses different services, not all the necessary information is available to everyone who needs it. Apotti, which is used in the Helsinki and Uusimaa region, was developed to unify the system and respond to this problem, but it has not been successful so far, so there is plenty to develop in the future as well. It would be great to have one day national system that would serve the entire health sector.
During the corona pandemic, work communities quickly adopted the use of digital work tools and development took a big step forward. We learned how to organize important negotiations remotely and save working time which we spent on travel earlier. We also started to organize patient appointments via remote connections.
The development of digitalization in healthcare can be seen nowadays in many other sectors also. It could be robotics, which is currently used in operating theaters and in the diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of patients. On the other hand, digitalization can be seen in the remote appointment of a doctor and the monitoring of patients via remote connections. It can be seen also as automation in drug distribution as well as assistants in the treatment of patients with poor mobility.
Due to the current and future shortage of nursing staff, further development of digitalization is crucial. It brings us handy work tools and resources, but also vulnerabilities. Cyber attacks against healthcare are becoming more common and patient information has gotten into the hands of criminals. The operation of hospitals and health clinics relies too much on digital tools and therefore can be a major risk for patients’ well-being. Just a small system error can crash and paralyzed the entire operation of the clinic. It is quite a scary thought if the hospital’s digital systems could be brought down for a longer period of time, it could cost human lives in the worst case… In my opinion, this vulnerability must be taken into account when developing services and when they replace previous ways of working. We should also focus on users of digital services. According to research, the elderly and the least educated people do not use digital services as much as others. Wider use of the services will therefore require more training and resources in the future.
Although digital tools will play an important role in the future, I wonder if they can ever replace meeting a real person? It give us great, super smart tools but still a person always needs another person, touch, comfort, compassion that we should never forget or try to replace.
BLOGS THAT I HAVE COMMENT:
Great post, I can feel you when reading about patient information system. All those thousands and thousands details which should play together seamlessly in one program and then the whole program should speak with numerous other programs. It’s like a card house and everything could collapse if one part doesn’t work. But still it is so much better than paper system! Cyber security is a big deal nowadays and we only can hope that all users understands it. I hope that digital tools are not our care keeper when we are old and we still have human contacts.
Excellent post. As an older citizen than you, I have lots of similar experiences, and as a for-mer caregiver I also understand some of your profession difficulties. In my opinion Apotti system is one of the bad examples how things work here in Finland. Nowadays we have often too many things that need to be repaired, but in this case it’s dangerous if Apotti system takes away nurses’ and doctors’ possibilites to take care for suffering patients.
Nice post! Many things that you wrote about digi development felt familiar. The change in how we used to deal with thing with pen and paper has been amazing and huge during last 30 years! I gratuated as a nurse just when everything started to work in electric patient papers but I still remember when older nurses were confused by it and would have wanted to stay with paper patient files.
I agree that we need more digitalized tools for treating patients but even more I agree that we can’t do everything digitally – we need helping hands and live meetings in nursing and health care even more.