Digitalization in my field of work

I work as a licensed nurse in primary care clinic services. I’ve graduated three years ago, so my experience is from a time when digitalization was already significantly advanced. In primary healthcare the biggest patient group is elderly people, so patient care and treatment lie on understanding the chronic illnesses and seeing the patient’s situation as a whole. A big part of our job is to gather information about our patients from different levels of care and various healthcare professionals. That’s why the effectiness and usability of patient information systems are so important. In the primary health care services of the Pirkanmaa wellbeing services county, where I work, we have begun developing digital service channels. The most significant change has been the new Digiklinikka, which offers our clients an equal and accessible digital channel for healthcare services. Many people have found their way to use the service, even elderly people. Even with these improvements, there is still a lot to learn and room for improvement.

As the digital channels have developed the nurse’s work is more done with computers and laying on an effective documentation. Even more of the patient’s treatment or problems can be fixed online, which is easier and faster for the patient but can be more time consuming for the professional. Example for professionals using the Digiklinikka can be more complex and time-consuming than handling the patient’s issue over the phone. In the future I hope that there will be digital tools to help to document all the information clearly, confidently and fast. Maybe AI or speech recognition? Doctors at our health care station already use speech recognition but I think it should be more widely used among all health care professions.

Maybe in the future we could also use AI to help gather the specified needed information from all the data that patient holds. That would speed up the work when patient has a lot of chronic illness or the care is spread to different healthcare professionals. I hope that in the future we can also make greater use of systems that allow patients to enter their self-measured results themselves, so that we can access them electronically and in real time. This would reduce the need for patients to return blood pressure or other measurements on paper, and it would be easier for the professionals.

What is GDPR and what are the risks of an open digital society?

There are many risks in an open digital society, but I think the biggest one is the misuse of personal information. There will always be people who want to exploit data, which is why we need to stay aware and do our best to prevent it. If people are not informed and educated in how to handle data and use digital tools, they may fall for scams and cause harm to themselves—or even to the entire organization. The overload of information can also lead to misunderstandings and make it difficult to know what is true. In addition, digitalization can cause inequality when not everyone has the same opportunities to access or use technology.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is legislation that governs the processing of personal data within the EU. It came into force in 2018 and sets strict requirements for companies and organizations on how personal data must be collected, managed, and stored. (Euroopan Unioni). I got to know the law for the first time while studying in this program, and it has been eye-opening since I wasn’t familiar with it before. I think it’s important that people have the possibility to refuse or have control over what personal data is collected from them. As our open digital society advances, the lack of awareness about data privacy is concerning. It’s important that we teach digital skills from a young age and also educate adults on this topic.I can’t see any negative sides to this law, since it’s truly necessary. Maybe it means a bit more work for companies, but that’s how it should have been from the beginning — it’s time to learn how to handle data properly.

I asked from Chat GPT two questions from my work field. The questions were: What are the alarming symptoms of low back pain and how should a streptococcal throat infection be treated?

For the first question, ChatGPT gave me a quite wide answer, even though I was specifically seeking the ‘red flag’ signs that indicate cauda equina syndrome. If ChatGPT were used during the evaluation of treatment necessity, it might provide too much information and even cause anxiety about successfully assessing the required treatment. It also provided a list of non-worrying symptoms which were correct. For the second question, it gave the correct answer, which was the same as what you can find in Terveysportti, and it also advised calculating the Centor score before even starting to examine the patient’s throat pain.

AI knows a lot about treating and evaluating patients, but I would still have a major barrier to fully trusting it’s treatment instructions alone. We use Terveysportti and Hoituki as our guidelines, and they feel reliable because we know they are reviewed by professionals. Patient cases can be very complex, and while AI might serve as a helpful tool in identifying the causes of symptoms, I hope it will never replace humans in drawing conclusions. I also hope that if AI speeds up or supports our work in the future, we won’t cut back on resources but instead use that saved time for our patients. But what do you think will happen?

Self evaluation

I found the study materials very interesting, and they made me really think about the future with an open digital society. Very few of us truly understand the possibilities that digitalization offers and also unfortunately what it can cause. The materials also showed that the development of digitalization is slow, since many of the things presented in the videos are not (yet) widely used. While learning about the GDPR, I realized that I still have a lot to improve in my digital skills and knowledge.

Posts I commented on:

Satu’s site

Elina’s site – Digitalized Working Enviroment course