DIGI CITIZEN

KELA 

Kela is the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. It is there to provide social security coverage both for Finnish residents and for Finns living abroad. Kela is there to help through the different stages of lives. The social security of Kela includes for example health insurance, basic economic security for families with children, financial aid for students, basic social assistance and basic unemployment security. To take care of your issues on the Internet you can use OmaKela which is Kela’s e-service for individual customers. From Kela’s website you can find information in Finnish, Swedish, English and Sami but however, the OmaKela is only available in Finnish and Swedish. 

The services me or my family have used provided by Kela have been related mainly to benefits for family with children and students’ financial aid. I usually use OmaKela because it is very easy to use and I haven’t visited Kela’s office personally for years. The European health care card I have also ordered for some years ago via OmaKela for me and for my kids. However, there was recently one form I had to fill and signed in to OmaKela to do it. I was very surprised to find out in OmaKela that it was a form that could be filled and sent only in paper form. It felt quite an old way but I did what was needed to be done. I’m quite sure that all the forms are to be filled in OmaKela in the future but maybe sometimes things can be so complicated that they take time.  

OmaKanta 

OmaKanta (in English My Kanta Pages) is a site where one can see for example records related to one’s treatment, laboratory tests and X-ray examinations, electronic prescriptions and EU digital COVID-19 vaccination certificate. 

I often use OmaKanta to see my own records but also my kids’ records. It is handy to see the texts there without having to ask them separately for example by calling because sometimes for example sometimes results of some tests take time to get ready. I usually sign in by using a mobile certificate. 

Keva 

Keva is a pension provider – the largest one in Finland. Keva administers the pensions for example of State, government, Kela, Bank of Finland and Evangelical Lutheran Church. The aim of Keva is to improve well-being at work, enhance work ability as well as to increase productivity and decrease costs of incapacity. 

My lowest retirement age is little bit over 67 years. I also found out that if I would work about two years longer than that my pension would rise more or less couple of hundreds per month. This sounds of course tempting but in the end it will be seen later on in the future how long my work life will last. 

Online shops 

I have every now and then bought things from for example eBay. The reason for this has been that there are more products and selection available there and some of the products I haven’t been able to find from local shops. The products are usually also cheaper as well. When searching the products it is possible to for example choose (if wanted) a brand, condition of the product and a price range and shipping options. I think that with Amazon it is quite the same. I haven’t had problems with them and I think that I have had all the information I have needed to make the purchase decision and the information has been reliable as well. I haven’t used these online shops for a while but as I browsed the pages now they seemed to work quite in a same way than before, maybe having better pictures on the products.  

What comes to Trivago, Booking.com and other online shops related to travelling my experience is that they work quite well, and the information they provide has been reliable and there has been enough of it. Sometimes there has been hesitation on purchase decision as the cancellation conditions and how to do it have been unclear. I haven’t travelled for a while now but when browsing the pages of these companies now they also seem quite the same as before. I think that the information available has been reliable. And my experience is that best offers are usually found online. 

Service/application from own field – Omaolo 

Omaolo is a national online service for social welfare and health care – a service where you can check the need for treatment 24 hours a day by assessing different kinds of symptoms and then contact health care professionals if needed in own municipality. I work among dental healthcare and in Omaolo there have recently become possible to asses dental or oral symptom or trauma. This is very good and I hope that the service will become more popular in the future. Sometimes people think that they have a very serious problem with their dental health but are then very relieved to hear from professionals that there is no problem or at least not that serious after all. The service may reduce kind of unnecessary phone calls or visits to the dental clinics. On the other hand because the assessment online is very easy and can be done 24 hours a day and anonymously to a certain point it may make the assessment more possible to be done and get the patients to contact and visit the dental clinics who really need it as well. I don’t have yet very much experience how this actually works because it’s still very new service among dental healthcare and still developing but at least the other assessments that I have tested have worked well. 

Digitalization and digital gap 

I think that people who are not using virtual services are in unequal position when compared to them who use them. For example I just heard a conversations in a local parking lot where an old man not having a smartphone and a certain application on it was no longer justified to park the first hour free like until now. I felt sorry for this old man because even though he would get a smartphone everyone don’t have people to teach them how to use them. I know that there are elder people who don’t own a telephone at all. I have a smartphone and the necessary application to park one hour free but it was a little bit complicated process to get it. I can only imagine how difficult it can be for elder people who don’t have that much experience on smartphones or the internet.

And same goes with other services as well – usually the best offers can be found online. I also think that today it is a supposition that people read information on services online and they aren’t explained that carefully on the telephone as workers are so busy. Companies also move nowadays as many services online as possible because they are cheaper there and also better available for the customers. I for example don’t remember when I have personally visited a bank last time as they are so short times open for services. It seems to be a little miracle if you actually need to visit for example in a bank. And then there is also the social media. It seems that people who don’t use it are somehow considered to be strange – at least among younger people. 

The Digital Competence test 

My results on the Digital Competence test were not very surprising, they reflect quite well the understanding that I have about my own digital skills and interests. One thing that caught my eye, however, on the results were sections related to storage, search and self-service – I maybe thought that they would have been little bit higher. Overall I’m not surprised that the safety section got the highest scores – I sometimes think that am I even little bit too scared and careful what comes to for example online services. But this was a good and interesting test to run and very informative too.

Self-reflection 

The assignments made me think the reliability of different online services more even though I have always tried to be as careful as possible. Even though I think that the digital development is mainly a good thing it is important to remember that there is always the flip side of the coin too – the digital gap really exists and it should be carried in mind when developing the services.

It was interesting to read about the thoughts of the other students as well and made me see the topic from a wider point of view as well. I also learned about new applications and services available online which the other students introduced it their blogs. It was very interesting.

Last but not least I learned from my own digital competence as well. First of all it was interesting to learn that there is such test available related to digital competence – I think I’m going to tell about it to couple of colleagues. It was also great to actually know through this test about my digital competence – I learned from this too and got some idea to support my suppositions on my strengths and weaknesses and on which level my skills truly are.

Blogs I commented: 

Silja: https://blogi.savonia.fi/siljakoivisto/digi-citizen/  
Sanna: https://blogi.savonia.fi/vidgrensanna/digi-citizen/  
Marjo: https://blogi.savonia.fi/marjopylkas/digi-citizen/