Finland as a pioneer in proactive social and healthcare (summary)

Summary

Finland’s social welfare and healthcare system is at a turning point: challenges in the sector, societal factors and global changes are increasing the strain on the system. Fundamental changes are necessary to ensure the functioning of the system. At the same time, the quantity and quality of data, artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation are evolving at a dizzying pace. These factors will enable more effective forecasting and prediction in the social welfare and health sector.

Proactive healthcare utilises data, AI and predictive methods to identify social and health problems before they arise. This boosts traditional prevention by delivering personalised, data-driven solutions that help target services in a timely, effective and efficient manner.

International examples show that many countries are already moving towards proactive healthcare and social welfare. The experiences from Denmark and the Netherlands show that proactive approaches prevent illness and make more efficient use of resources. Estonia and the Netherlands have good experiences of how digitalisation has enabled citizens to become more actively involved in their own health.

Canada, Singapore and the UK highlight the role of AI and analytics in optimising healthcare. Canada and Singapore have shown how policy can guide healthcare development in the long term.

In Finland, proactive healthcare and social welfare have been identified as an important objective in national visions, but the political and economic governance do not always support it, and they are sometimes even in conflict with it. In practice, proactive healthcare and social welfare in Finland is mainly implemented as development projects by a few wellbeing services counties and universities targeting limited groups of clients or specific diagnosis groups. The benefits of preventative healthcare have already been recognised through these experiments and pilots.

Finland has every prospect of succeeding in proactive healthcare. In particular, the abundance of data, national data resources, the use of pharmacogenetics in specialised healthcare and the expertise in artificial intelligence provide a solid basis for this. The integration of healthcare and social welfare services introduced by the reform will further support the success. However, there are significant barriers that have slowed down wider uptake.

A proactive healthcare and social welfare system requires multidisciplinary cooperation between the state, municipalities, wellbeing counties, technology companies, private healthcare and social welfare actors and research organisations. Large-scale deployment also requires strong national leadership, the development of legislation and its consistent interpretation, and supportive and innovative funding.

In wellbeing services counties, promoting proactive healthcare and social welfare requires experimentation and dissemination of lessons learned, bold leadership to bring about systemic change, skills and reorganisation of services.

Proactive healthcare and social welfare methods can help shift the focus from corrective to proactive; target investigations and treatments individually; and use scarce resources where they are most useful. This will help to contain the rising costs of the healthcare and social welfare sector and achieve a sustainable, effective and human-centred social care system.

Publication is available in Finnish.