Me, a digi citizen
I remember the time when services of Kela, the social security institution of Finland, were non-existent. To apply for benefits one needed to go to Kela’s service point to fill out the forms or send them via mail. One could also call Kela to get assistance. All the attachments needed to be printed on paper on provided with the application form. For unemployment benefits one needed also to visit employment services in order to complete the application. Nowdays, it’s all different. Almost everything in Kela and other social and health care services can be handeled at least partly in digital platforms. Let’s dive in!
Me using digital social and health care services
As for right now, me and my family do not use much of Kela’s services or recieve benefits. Our child recieves monthly child benefit and I have to pay the healthcare fee for students in higher education. Recently, my wife recieved partial care allowance for a short period of time for working four days of week instead of five to support the beginning of school of our child. For years I have handeled everything Kela-related in OmaKela, which is the E-service for everything Kela-related. As requested in assignment of this article, I applied for European Health Care card in OmaKela. I found the application very fast and in was very easy to fill (three questions in total!) I will return to OmaKela this week to pay for the students health care free, which I expect to pay almost as easy.
Next I headed to MyKanta, which is a online service for social and healthcare data of Finland. In MyKanta one can view all personal social and healthcare date from public and private services. I did access to MyKanta with Suomi.fi -identification service in which I used my online bank service to identify myself. I did use my online bank service with my phone, which made the identification very fast. Accessing to MyKanta is very easy and fast and operatiing in the service is very easy also, at least once you get used to navigating in it.
Then it was time to go to Keva to check out my pension information. Keva is the largest pension provider of Finland. The service of estimating the amount of one’s pension was not familiar for me from before. The service told me that my lowest age for starting to recieve pension was 67 years and six months. I tried to calculate my pension if I started my pension in 63 years old, but the calculator informed me that I could not recieve pension from Keva at that age. If I would start my pension at 68 years old, I would recieve approximately 2500 € per month as a pension. The service was interesting and easy to use and it teached me that there is a plenty of working years ahead of me!
I am really glad for these multiple digital services. Like I wrote in the beginning of this article, only about 15 years ago, to get all this information and service I did get in less than one hour while writing about my experince at the same, would have required several hours visiting offices and filling out applications. Great progress of the digital society of Finland, I would say!
More about digital services and the digital gap
I have been a web shopper for a while. I shop clothes, household items and sometimes even food from the web. The reason I do it is the fact that it is so easy. If I know what I want, all it takes is a few clicks and the order is placed. But sometimes web shopping being very easy actually costs you more money. I did a little comparison on the pair of jeans I bought a month ago. In the webstore the pair of jeans was 49,99 € with additional delivery costs of 5,99 €. It was really clearly stated in the webstore, which is not always the case. When you shop the web, you should be prepared of paying for additional service fee, delivery costs and sometimes custom fees. This time I ordered the jeans to be picked up from the store so there were no additional costs. Except for maybe one thing: time. I had to wait for few days for my order to be ready. If I had gone straight to the store and maybe bought other jeans of my size I would have saved the most precious currency we people have. Web shopping might be easy, but in the end not as cheap as I sometimes seems it is.
One web solution that saves time and possibly money is OmaMehiläinen which is digital service platform of Mehiläinen Hospital in Finland. Mehiläinen is a private sector hospital from which my company buys the occupational health services. In OmaMehiläinen I can chat with a doctor or nurse, have video appointements, renew my presprictions etc. I can use OmaMehiläinen with computre or with my mobile phone, which is my preferred device.
I chose to hightlight OmaMehiläinen in this article for one particular reason. The reason is that OmaMehiläinen has been my main platform for using health care services for almost five years now. I have dealt with everything from work stress to pneumonia using OmaMehiläinen. Most of the times I have been able to get everything I need from my home, without having to use time and energy to move from one place to another. Of course, not everything is doable with mobile application, but I do believe using it has saved a lot of my time and energy and most likely the time and energy of health care professionals. I remember the time where everything I do with OmaMehiläinen was done with phones and physical letters. It was time and energy consuming and in addition, it was slow. I feel like I get help faster when I need it and in more efficent manner. That’s why I think OmaMehiläinen and solutions like that a brilliant addition to the health care system.
Mentioning and praising OmaMehiläinen brings me to the last topic of this article. The digital gap. The digital gap means the gap between those people who can and will use the digital services (and such) and the people who cannot or do not want to use them. People who cannot or do not want to use digital services includes many kinds of people: elderly, diasbled, immigrants and those who just strongly oppose the overuse of technology. The gap is real and it causes a lot of challenges in our society. For example The Finnish Constitution says that everyone in Finland is entitled to appropriate social and health care services. If everything is in digital, how is everyone going to reach the services? This puts a large number of people in a risk of suffering lack of care when they need it. Getting acces to digital services is one thing, Another important point of view is how to make sure that everyone knows how to use the services? For example, logging in the OmaMehiläinen is rather easy thing to do, but after that, user must know how to navigate in the system. How do we make sure that every user knows what to do? This are the kinds of questions we need to be asking in the times digitalization. And it’s one of the reasons why I am wrote this article as part of my studies.
The Digital Competence Test and self evaluation
I did The Digital Competence test and you can see my results here:
I think I got reasonably good results from the test. What surprises me the most is the poist from Safety-category. I consider myself very aware on cyber threats etc, but the results clearly show that there is work for me to be done on that field! My best points come from Information-category and espescially the Self-Service sub-category, which is not a surprise for me. During this article I have many times compared the social and health care services with digitalization and without digitalization. I can say that I really like how the digitalization has made the services easy to use and approach for my personal point of view. On the other hand this article has made it clear to me, that the digitalization is only one tool among many in social and health care. I think calling it a tool is a good idea. It’s a tool to reach out for people how need the services and to make services more efficent in some way. But it’s not the only tool. Social and health care cannot be only accesible to digi citizens like me. They need to me accesible for everyone. Just like our society is build for all of it’s citizens.
I commented on:
Hi Ville!
Thank you for your text! The OmaMehiläinen application sounds like an easy to use and time saving service. Services like this are becoming increasingly common. I work for the City of Kuopio and we use standard occupational health care services. A few months ago we received new instructions about what to do if an employee gets suddenly ill during the weekend when they were supposed to work. In that case, the instructions are specifically to contact a doctor through the chat service. I know that some employees have used this service, but it hasn’t come up in conversation how they experience this service. Still digital services have found their place as part of occupational health care.
In your text, you reflected well on the digital leap that has significantly transformed services. For many people, this development has been welcome, but as you wrote, there are also many for whom traditional practices work better. It is important that there is still room for traditional ways of handling things in the future, because there are groups of people who either do not know how or do not want to use digital services.
Here is the link to my blog: https://blogi.savonia.fi/maijukarkkainen/
Have a nice summer!
-Maiju
Hi Ville!
You wrote in your blog post about online shopping. I agree with you that it’s easy, fast, and definitely has its place. However, I’ve started to wonder—has it become too easy for us to shop online? Nowadays, you can order almost anything to anywhere.
This convenience can reduce our need to leave the house or interact with others, while increasing the time we spend on our mobile devices. In some situations, it’s great to save time and energy, but maybe we should think more about the potential downsides of online shopping—like its impact on the environment, shipping costs, and the loss of human interaction. Also for younger people especially, it’s easy to end up spending more money than intended when shopping online becomes an easy way to fill free time at home. But as a final thought, I would say that digitalization will always have both its pros and cons. It’s up to us to find a balanced middle ground as we follow the progress of the world. 🙂
Wishing beautiful summer days, Oona
Here’s my blog in case you are interested: https://blogi.savonia.fi/oonavuoltee/
Your writing really brings the topic to life! I appreciated the personal stories—especially how you compared the past and present ways of dealing with Kela and healthcare services. It shows how much digitalisation has changed everyday life for the better.
I also liked how you highlighted the benefits of services like OmaMehiläinen while not ignoring the challenges of the digital gap. That reflection made your text feel thoughtful and balanced.
Your voice comes through clearly, and your message about accessibility for all is important and well said. A really engaging and meaningful read!
Hi Ville, Your writing style was engaging and personal. I especially liked your story about how much digital services have improved compared to 15 years ago. It’s amazing how fast things have changed. Your reflection on OmaMehiläinen was interesting, and I agree that such services save time and energy. Also, your thoughts on the digital gap were well said. We really need to think about how to help those who struggle with technology. Thank you for your post!
Hi!
I really liked your thoughts about the development of digital services.
It really has made everyday life much easier when you can conveniently fill in applications and forms online, and you don’t have to visit different offices in person and spend time on trips or queuing for a customer service representative.
I am also using the OmaMehiläinen application, because our occupational health is in Mehiläinen. I think it’s simple to use and you can conveniently take care of your own health matters. You can easily find your laboratory results, prescriptions and you can send messages with your treating doctor. For minor health issues, you can easily contact a digital doctor or conveniently renew your prescription via chat.
Digitalization is progressing rapidly, and I have been thinking about how to ensure that everyone stays equally involved in this development. And that everyone has the opportunity to stay involved. That is why it is important that digital services are developed from a customer-oriented perspective, and it is also important to note that there are different types of users.
Here is a link to my page if you want to hear my thoughts about this section:
https://blogi.savonia.fi/laurikainensini/
-Sini-