Taltioni: the power to manage your own health

It is difficult to form an overall picture of one’s own health and the factors affecting it without sufficient information.  With the help of Taltioni, a new electronic self-care service platform promoted by Sitra, everyone can manage information related to their own health and everyone can affect their well-being through their own choices. The key aim of the service innovation is to shift the focus of healthcare from the treatment of illnesses to preventive healthcare.

With the help of electronic self-care services using Taltioni’s single platform solution, its extensive database and the information collated therein, citizens get to promote their health and well-being – and become leading experts on it. At the same time, citizens are encouraged to think more for themselves when it comes to their own health.

“It is impossible to demand that people take more responsibility for their health without giving them functioning tools,” says Antti Kivelä, Executive Director at Sitra. “Services developed for self-care and information derived from them aim to promote health while supporting treatment, after-care and monitoring.

“Information collected in Taltioni’s personal health accounts does not replace the data collected by various healthcare professionals but it could be used for centrally storing information from various services and systems, which has been either self-produced or received from healthcare professionals,” says Kivelä.

Examples of data collected in personal health accounts could include vaccination information, laboratory test results or individual blood pressure measurements, food diaries and jogging diaries. Through a variety of analysis services, citizens can form an overall idea about their health and the factors affecting it, and use this information to enhance their well-being through their own choices.

Creating a healthier population

Sitra’s two-year project has promoted the single platform and ecosystem comprising the public, private and third sectors. Taltioni is an example of activities promoting sustainable well-being, which is one of the focus areas of Sitra’s new strategy.

Mikko Kosonen, the President of Sitra, is clear about what constitutes the key effects of sustainable well-being: “For Taltioni, social sustainability means the development of healthcare with a focus on citizens and equality. We are supporting economic sustainability by shifting the focus from healthcare to health promotion, which will enable us to curb the increase of healthcare expenditure by creating healthier citizens.

“Economic sustainability can also be promoted by providing new business opportunities to healthcare and well-being service developers and ICT operators.”

Taltioni – all the info in just one place

The Taltioni cooperative will continue Sitra’s work as an independent operator with the task of developing the technical platform and operating environment for the services. The single service platform is based on open standardised interfaces.

Tuomas Teuri, the CEO of the Taltioni cooperative, says: “Decentralisation of health information in different organisations or as printouts kept in drawers is a problem from an individual’s perspective. It would be more sensible to create a national data depository, where this data could be collected, whether it is related to illnesses, health or well-being. The competition between data depositories should rather be transferred to service innovations.

Teuri is also keen to stress that the individuals using the services maintain their own responsibilities: “The non-profit Taltioni cooperative promotes the development of this single platform and services compatible with it. By joining the cooperative, various parties can develop increasingly good services on top of a single data depository. On the other hand, members also commit to complying with Taltioni’s strict quality criteria. It is, of course, the individuals who decide what services they wish to use and with whom to share their information.”

At the moment, Taltioni has 32 members who are participating in the development of the ecosystem. The first Taltioni services are estimated to be available for citizens at the turn of the year.

The world takes note

Taltioni’s national solution has also raised international interest. Taltioni was presented as a practice-oriented example of future healthcare services in an appendix to a report giving recommendations for safer, better and more efficient healthcare (eHealth Task Force Report – Redesigning health in Europe for 2020).

Taltioni in a nutshell

• Taltioni is a database and a service platform that enables all Finns to store, collect, produce and share electronic information related to their health and well-being. The data is accessible from various devices and user interfaces, regardless of time and place.
• Data security is Taltioni’s most important feature. Each citizen owns their information and decides who and which applications are granted access to the data.
• From the overall society’s perspective, the key benefits are the promotion of health and well-being of its citizens.

Further information

Antti Kivelä, Executive Director, Sitra, tel.+358 40 482 7435, etunimi.sukunimi@sitra.fi
Tuomas Teuri, CEO, Taltioni cooperative, tel. +358 40 754 9707